(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2009)
Harrold, Mary Jean; Santelices, Raul
Symbolic execution is a static-analysis technique that has been used
for applications such as test-input generation and change analysis.
Symbolic execution’s path sensitivity makes scaling it difficult.
Despite recent advances that reduce the number of paths to
explore, the scalability problem remains. Moreover, there are applications
that require the analysis of all paths in a program fragment,
which exacerbate the scalability problem. In this paper, we
present a new technique, called Symbolic Program Approximation
(SPA), that performs an approximation of the symbolic execution
of all paths between two program points by abstracting away certain
symbolic subterms to make the symbolic analysis practical, at
the cost of some precision. We discuss several applications of SPA,
including testing of software changes and static invariant discovery.
We also present a tool that implements SPA and an empirical evaluation
on change analysis and testing that shows the applicability,
effectiveness, and potential of our technique.
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2009)
Shah, Hina; Görg, Carsten; Harrold, Mary Jean
This paper presents a new visualization technique for supporting the understanding of exception-handling constructs in
Java programs. To understand the requirements for such a visualization, we surveyed a group of software developers, and
used the results of that survey to guide the creation of the visualizations. The technique presents the exception-handling
information using three views: the quantitative view, the flow view, and the contextual view. The quantitative view provides a
high-level view that shows the throw-catch interactions in the program, along with relative numbers of these interactions, at
the package level, the class level, and the method level. The flow view shows the type-throw-catch interactions, illustrating
information such as which exception types reach particular throw statements, which catch statements handle particular
throw statements, and which throw statements are not caught in the program. The contextual view shows, for particular
type-throw-catch interactions, the packages, classes, and methods that contribute to that exception-handling construct. We
implemented our technique in an Eclipse plugin called EnHanCe and conducted a usability and utility study with participants
in industry.