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DBGBench

From Practitioners for Researchers

Summary

How do professional software engineers debug computer programs? In an experiment with 27 real bugs that existed in several widely used programs, we invited 12 professional software engineers, who together spent one month on localizing, explaining, and fixing these bugs. This did not only allow us to study the various tools and strategies used to debug the same set of errors. We could also determine exactly which statements a developer would localize as faults, how a developer would diagnose and explain an error, and how a developer would fix an error – all of which software engineering researchers seek to automate. Until now, it has been difficult to evaluate the effectiveness and utility of automated debugging techniques without a user study. We publish the collected data, called DBGBENCH, to facilitate the effective evaluation of automated fault localization, diagnosis, and repair techniques w.r.t. the judgement of human experts.

FAQ
Downloads
Data for find
Data for grep
Data on patches
Execute w/ Docker
Use and reproduce
Learn more & Cite us
DBGBench Paper

Main Objectives


FAQ

DBGBench

In the following we provide the complete list of errors and their average debugging time, difficulty, and patch correctness, with human-generated explanations of the runtime actions leading to the error, and examples of correct and incorrect fixes, sorted according to average debugging time. For each error, we also provide the commit introducing the error, the simplified and original bug report, the fault locations, and the submitted and original patches.

Setup and Infrastructure

GNU Findutils

GNU findutils offers basic file searching utilities to search the systems directories of GNU and Unix-based computers.

Descriptive Statistics                                Benchmark Details                               
[find.24e2271e]
Error Type: Functional Bug
Avg. Debugging Time: 13.8 min
Explanation: Slightly difficult
Patching: Slightly difficult
Patch Correctness: 75%		 Regression: Developer
Bug Report: Simple, Original
Fault Locations: Participants
Bug Diagnosis: Participants
Patches: Participants Developer
Tests: Researcher
[find.dbcb10e9]
Error Type: Crash
Avg. Debugging Time: 22.9 min
Explanation: Slightly difficult
Patching: Slightly difficult
Patch Correctness: 81%		 Regression: Developer
Bug Report: Simple, Original
Fault Locations: Participants
Bug Diagnosis: Participants
Patches: Participants Developer
Tests: Researcher
[find.07b941b1]
Error Type: Crash
Avg. Debugging Time: 23.7 min
Explanation: Slightly difficult
Patching: Slightly difficult
Patch Correctness: 80%		 Regression: Developer
Bug Report: Simple, Original
Fault Locations: Participants
Bug Diagnosis: Participants
Patches: Participants Developer
Tests: Researcher
[find.c8491c11]
Error Type: Crash
Avg. Debugging Time: 31.4 min
Explanation: Slightly difficult
Patching: Slightly difficult
Patch Correctness: 54%		 Regression: Developer
Bug Report: Simple, Original
Fault Locations: Participants
Bug Diagnosis: Participants
Patches: Participants Developer
Tests: Researcher
[find.6e4cecb6]
Error Type: Functional Bug
Avg. Debugging Time: 38.2 min
Explanation: Moderately difficult
Patching: Not at all difficult
Patch Correctness: 89%		 Regression: Developer
Bug Report: Simple, Original
Fault Locations: Participants
Bug Diagnosis: Participants
Patches: Participants Developer
Tests: Researcher
[find.091557f6]
Error Type: Crash
Avg. Debugging Time: 44.8 min
Explanation: Slightly difficult
Patching: Slightly difficult
Patch Correctness: 54%		 Regression: Developer
Bug Report: Simple, Original
Fault Locations: Participants
Bug Diagnosis: Participants
Patches: Participants Developer
Tests: Researcher
[find.24bf33c0]
Error Type: Crash
Avg. Debugging Time: 45.1 min
Explanation: Moderately difficult
Patching: Slightly difficult
Patch Correctness: 50%		 Regression: Developer
Bug Report: Simple, Original
Fault Locations: Participants
Bug Diagnosis: Participants
Patches: Participants Developer
Tests: Researcher
[find.183115d0]
Error Type: Resource Leak
Avg. Debugging Time: 49.2 min
Explanation: Slightly difficult
Patching: Slightly difficult
Patch Correctness: 83%		 Regression: Developer
Bug Report: Simple, Original
Fault Locations: Participants
Bug Diagnosis: Participants
Patches: Participants Developer
Tests: Researcher
[find.93623752]
Error Type: Functional Bug
Avg. Debugging Time: 50.8 min
Explanation: Moderately difficult
Patching: Slightly difficult
Patch Correctness: 92%		 Regression: Developer
Bug Report: Simple, Original
Fault Locations: Participants
Bug Diagnosis: Participants
Patches: Participants Developer
Tests: Researcher
[find.66c536bb]
Error Type: Functional Bug
Avg. Debugging Time: 55.5 min
Explanation: Moderately difficult
Patching: Slightly difficult
Patch Correctness: 92%		 Regression: Developer
Bug Report: Simple, Original
Fault Locations: Participants
Bug Diagnosis: Participants
Patches: Participants Developer
Tests: Researcher
[find.b445af98]
Error Type: Functional Bug
Avg. Debugging Time: 56.5 min
Explanation: Moderately difficult
Patching: Slightly difficult
Patch Correctness: 50%		 Regression: Developer
Bug Report: Simple, Original
Fault Locations: Participants
Bug Diagnosis: Participants
Patches: Participants Developer
Tests: Researcher
[find.ff248a20]
Error Type: Infinite Loop
Avg. Debugging Time: 57.7 min
Explanation: Moderately difficult
Patching: Moderately difficult
Patch Correctness: 40%		 Regression: Developer
Bug Report: Simple, Original
Fault Locations: Participants
Bug Diagnosis: Participants
Patches: Participants Developer
Tests: Researcher
[find.e6680237]
Error Type: Functional Bug
Avg. Debugging Time: 76.4 min
Explanation: Moderately difficult
Patching: Moderately difficult
Patch Correctness: 27%		 Regression: Developer
Bug Report: Simple, Original
Fault Locations: Participants
Bug Diagnosis: Participants
Patches: Participants Developer
Tests: Researcher
[find.e1d0a991]
Error Type: Functional Bug
Avg. Debugging Time: 88.2 min
Explanation: Very difficult
Patching: Very difficult
Patch Correctness: 17%		 Regression: Developer
Bug Report: Simple, Original
Fault Locations: Participants
Bug Diagnosis: Participants
Patches: Participants Developer
Tests: Researcher

GNU Grep

GNU grep is a command-line utility for searching plain-text data sets for lines that match a regular expression.

Descriptive Statistics                                Benchmark Details                               
[grep.55cf7b6a]
Error Type: Functional Bug
Avg. Debugging Time: 21.1 min
Explanation: Slightly difficult
Patching: Not at all difficult
Patch Correctness: 91%		 Regression: Developer
Bug Report: Simple, Original
Fault Locations: Participants
Bug Diagnosis: Participants
Patches: Participants Developer
Tests: Researcher
[grep.54d55bba]
Error Type: Crash
Avg. Debugging Time: 26.7 min
Explanation: Slightly difficult
Patching: Slightly difficult
Patch Correctness: 69%		 Regression: Developer
Bug Report: Simple, Original
Fault Locations: Participants
Bug Diagnosis: Participants
Patches: Participants Developer
Tests: Researcher
[grep.9c45c193]
Error Type: Functional Bug
Avg. Debugging Time: 37.7 min
Explanation: Moderately difficult
Patching: Slightly difficult
Patch Correctness: 83%		 Regression: Developer
Bug Report: Simple, Original
Fault Locations: Participants
Bug Diagnosis: Participants
Patches: Participants Developer
Tests: Researcher
[grep.5fa8c7c9]
Error Type: Infinite Loop
Avg. Debugging Time: 38.8 min
Explanation: Moderately difficult
Patching: Slightly difficult
Patch Correctness: 50%		 Regression: Developer
Bug Report: Simple, Original
Fault Locations: Participants
Bug Diagnosis: Participants
Patches: Participants Developer
Tests: Researcher
[grep.db9d6340]
Error Type: Infinite Loop
Avg. Debugging Time: 40.6 min
Explanation: Slightly difficult
Patching: Slightly difficult
Patch Correctness: 45%		 Regression: Developer
Bug Report: Simple, Original
Fault Locations: Participants
Bug Diagnosis: Participants
Patches: Participants Developer
Tests: Researcher
[grep.2be0c659]
Error Type: Functional Bug
Avg. Debugging Time: 47.2 min
Explanation: Moderately difficult
Patching: Moderately difficult
Patch Correctness: 13%		 Regression: Developer
Bug Report: Simple, Original
Fault Locations: Participants
Bug Diagnosis: Participants
Patches: Participants Developer
Tests: Researcher
[grep.8f08d8e2]
Error Type: Functional Bug
Avg. Debugging Time: 48.4 min
Explanation: Moderately difficult
Patching: Moderately difficult
Patch Correctness: 75%		 Regression: Developer
Bug Report: Simple, Original
Fault Locations: Participants
Bug Diagnosis: Participants
Patches: Participants Developer
Tests: Researcher
[grep.58195fab]
Error Type: Functional Bug
Avg. Debugging Time: 50.5 min
Explanation: Moderately difficult
Patching: Slightly difficult
Patch Correctness: 82%		 Regression: Developer
Bug Report: Simple, Original
Fault Locations: Participants
Bug Diagnosis: Participants
Patches: Participants Developer
Tests: Researcher
[grep.c1cb19fe]
Error Type: Functional Bug
Avg. Debugging Time: 58.4 min
Explanation: Very difficult
Patching: Slightly difficult
Patch Correctness: 71%		 Regression: Developer
Bug Report: Simple, Original
Fault Locations: Participants
Bug Diagnosis: Participants
Patches: Participants Developer
Tests: Researcher
[grep.7aa698d3]
Error Type: Functional Bug
Avg. Debugging Time: 59.9 min
Explanation: Moderately difficult
Patching: Moderately difficult
Patch Correctness: 13%		 Regression: Developer
Bug Report: Simple, Original
Fault Locations: Participants
Bug Diagnosis: Participants
Patches: Participants Developer
Tests: Researcher
[grep.3220317a]
Error Type: Crash
Avg. Debugging Time: 63.7 min
Explanation: Moderately difficult
Patching: Moderately difficult
Patch Correctness: 20%		 Regression: Developer
Bug Report: Simple, Original
Fault Locations: Participants
Bug Diagnosis: Participants
Patches: Participants Developer
Tests: Researcher
[grep.3c3bdace]
Error Type: Crash
Avg. Debugging Time: 64.8 min
Explanation: Very difficult
Patching: Moderately difficult
Patch Correctness: 70%		 Regression: Developer
Bug Report: Simple, Original
Fault Locations: Participants
Bug Diagnosis: Participants
Patches: Participants Developer
Tests: Researcher
[grep.c96b0f2c]
Error Type: Functional Bug
Avg. Debugging Time: 67.6 min
Explanation: Very difficult
Patching: Moderately difficult
Patch Correctness: 50%		 Regression: Developer
Bug Report: Simple, Original
Fault Locations: Participants
Bug Diagnosis: Participants
Patches: Participants Developer
Tests: Researcher

How to Cite?

@inproceedings{dbgbench, 
  author = {B\"{o}hme, Marcel and Soremekun, Ezekiel Olamide and Chattopadhyay, Sudipta and Ugherughe, Emamurho and Zeller, Andreas}, 
  title = {Where is the Bug and How is it Fixed? An Experiment with Practitioners}, 
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 11th Joint meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering}, 
  series = {ESEC/FSE 2017}, 
  pages = {1-11}, 
  year = {2017},
}


DBGBench is based on CoREBench, a collection of 70 real regression errors in four open source projects (coreutils, findutils, grep, and make). Since DBGBench reuses and extends many results from CoREBench (e.g., infrastructure, developer bug reports, and developer patches), we recommend that both references be cited.

@inproceedings{corebench,
 author = {B\"{o}hme, Marcel and Roychoudhury, Abhik},
 title = {CoREBench: Studying Complexity of Regression Errors},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the 23rd ACM/SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis},
 series = {ISSTA 2014},
 pages = {105-115},
 year = {2014},
}

Who are we?

This work was initiated at the end of 2014 over lunch when we argued about reasons for the prevailing chasm between research and practice in automated debugging, and the surprising lack of user studies in software engineering at large. Of course then, we set out to get our own hands dirty. Rather than evaluating a specific debugging technique, we wanted to investigate the manual debugging process, and more importantly provide a benchmark that can serve as reality check for any novel debugging technique. It took our team more than two years of carefully planning, preparing, recruiting, and evaluating until we could finally publish the DBGBench paper. Each of the team members was for a large part of the study affiliated with Saarland University, Germany.