Software and Computational Systems Lab

Debugging software usually consists of three steps: 1. finding an error in the program, 2. finding the cause for that error (the fault), and 3. fixing that fault. By default, fixing the fault is done manually by a programmer, which often consumes vast amount of resources and may introduce new bugs. To ease that task, this topic is concerned with automatic program repair. After finding a potential fault in a program, automatic program repair proposes fixes and often checks the validity of these fixes. The goal is to implement and evaluate a technique for automatic program repair in C programs in the state-of-the-art verification framework CPAchecker. The complexity of the technique and the scope of the topic is based on the thesis type (project, bachelor or master). Programming is done in Java.

There are many different ways to find out whether a program is buggy, for example testing or formal verification. Once we know that a program is buggy, i.e., that it shows some faulty behavior, a developer has to manually debug the program to find the cause of the problem and fix it - this is a difficult and long-taking process. The aim of this thesis is to help programmers with debugging through the use of distance metrics (cf. Explaining Abstract Counterexamples, 2004).

There are many different ways to find out whether a program is buggy, for example testing or formal verification. Once we know that a program is buggy, i.e., that it shows some faulty behavior, a developer has to manually debug the program to find the cause of the problem and fix it - this is a difficult and long-taking process. The aim of this thesis is to help programmers with debugging by implementing Error Invariants and bug-finding with unsat cores, techniques for bug-finding based on boolean representations of the faulty program, to (1) automatically find potential causes for faulty behavior and (2) present the found causes.

There are many different ways to find out whether a program is buggy, for example testing or formal verification. Once we know that a program is buggy, i.e., that it shows some faulty behavior, a developer has to manually debug the program to find the cause of the problem and fix it - this is a difficult and long-taking process. The aim of this thesis is to help programmers with debugging by implementing Tarantula, a technique for bug-finding based on test coverage, to (1) automatically find potential causes for faulty behavior and (2) present the found causes.

Conditional Model Checking and Conditional Testing are two techniques for the combination of respective verification tools. Conditional Testing describes work done through a set of covered test goals and Conditional Model Checking describes work done through condition automata. Because of this discrepancy, the two techniques can not be combined. To bridge this gap, this thesis transforms a set of test goals into a condition automaton to allow easy cooperation between Conditional Testing and Conditional Model Checking.

At the moment, there are two ways to use CPAchecker: Locally through the command-line, and in the cloud through a web interface. Both options require C developers to leave their IDE everytime they want to run CPAchecker, which disrupts their workflow. The goal of this project is to build an IDE plugin that provides a seamless experience of using CPAchecker (e.g., for Eclipse CDT, VisualStudio Code or mbeddr). We would like the plugin to focus on ease of use and immediate feedback that is easy to comprehend. The plugin should:

1. allow developers to run CPAchecker on their current project,
2. provide some options for customization (e.g., whether to run CPAchecker locally or in the cloud), and
3. provide useful feedback (e.g., if a possibly failing assert-Statement was found by CPAchecker)