Identifying Faulty Modifications in Software Maintenance

Software maintenance involves making changes to a program to correct errors, to improve efficiency, or to extend the program functionality. The existing algorithmic debuggers generally only take into account the modified software, i.e., they do not take into account the original software and modifications being made. However, in software maintenance the original software has been tested and analyzed previously. In software maintenance the goal of debugging is to identify those modifications that cause incorrect program behavior, rather than to identify faulty statements. In this paper we present an approach that uses the information about the original software and determines those modifications that more likely contain fault. In this approach, the modifications that are made to the program are first identified. Then, forward dynamic dependence analysis is used to determine the most suspicious modifications.