In order to produce effective fault-localization, debugging, failure-clustering, and test-suite maintenance techniques, researchers would benefit from a deeper understanding of how faults (i.e., bugs) behave and interact with each other. Some faults, even if executed, may or may not propagate to the output, and even still may or may not influence the output in a way to cause failure. Furthermore, in the presence of multiple faults, faults may interact in a way to obscure each other or in a way to produce behavior not seen in their isolation.
Sourcerer is an ongoing research project at the University of California, Irvine aimed at exploring open source projects through the use of code analysis. The existence of an extremely large body of open source code presents a tremendous opportunity for software engineering research. Not only do we leverage this code for our own research, but we provide the open source Sourcerer Infrastructure and curated datasets for other researchers to use.
The Sourcerer Infrastructure is composed of a number of layers.
To enable much of our research to enable program understanding, software quality, and maintenance, we utilize and develop analyses of program code. These analyses model the flows of information through the logic of programs and systems. With these analysis models enable automated techniques to assist development and maintenance tasks.
ISR
