Re: [rvm-research] Automating test case generation?

[Kenneth H. <ken...@ug...>]

On Oct 20, 2009, at 7:35 PM, Suriya Subramanian wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> Quite often, I encounter Jikes RVM bugs that show up when running  
> complex
> applications. Most of the time, I have been able to construct small  
> test
> programs that demonstrate buggy behavior.
>
> Starting with the application jEdit I was able to find this bug  
> RVM-868
> http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/RVM-868 and a test case
> http://jira.codehaus.org/secure/attachment/45362/ 
> ResolverTestCase.java that
> is about 20 lines long. I was lucky today and it took me about 15  
> minutes
> to get to here. This is an exception. Usually, this process has been
> difficult and time-consuming.
>
> Are there ways to automate this process, i.e. removing parts of an
> application that do not contribute to some behavior we are looking  
> at? I am
> sure there should be a lot of research done in this area. Can  
> someone give
> me pointers. Are there tools that are readily usable?

You should look into delta (http://delta.tigris.org/), and especially  
the more recent
multidelta tool.

Although it's targeted towards GCC mainly, I think you should be able to
get it to work with other stuff too with a fair amount of work.

I've used it to reduce testcases for GCC bugs, with spectacular results.

greetings,

Kenneth