Mining Bug Reports for Efficient Software Testing and Debugging

Tingting Yu

Event Details
Thursday, February 14, 2019
Talk:
4 p.m., Avery 115

Reception:
3:30 p.m., Avery 348

Tingting Yu, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor, University of Kentucky

Abstract

Modern software projects use issue tracking systems to keep track of software bugs reported by developers and users during the software lifetime. Developers heavily rely on bug reports in issue tracking systems to debug and fix bugs. Once developers receive a bug report, one of the first steps to debugging the issue is to reproduce the reported bug. However, the process of bug reproduction is often manually done by developers, making the resolution of bugs inefficient, especially that bug reports are often written in natural language. In this talk, I present an approach that can automatically reproduce issues from bug reports, targeted at Android apps, to improve the productivity of developers in resolving software bugs. Our approach uses a combination of natural language processing and dynamic GUI exploration to synthesize test scripts with the goal of reproducing the reported bug. We also show that our approach can extract input parameters from bug reports, which can be used to guide test case generation for testing future versions of the software. 

Speaker Bio

Tingting Yu is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at University of Kentucky. She received her Ph.D degree from University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 2014. Her research interests include software engineering, software testing, concurrent systems, and cyber-physical systems. Dr. Yu received the ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award in 2016. She was a recipient of the NSF Faculty CAREER Award in 2017.