Lightweight bug localization with AMPLE

Abstract

AMPLE locates likely failure-causing classes by comparing method call sequences of passing and failing runs. A difference in method call sequences, such as multiple deallocation of the same resource, is likely to point to the erroneous class. Such sequences can be collected from arbitrary Java programs at low cost; comparing object-specific sequences predicts defects better than simply comparing coverage. AMPLE comes as a plug-in for the Java IDE Eclipse that is automatically invoked as soon as a JUnit test fails.