Scalable software-defect localisation by hierarchical mining of dynamic call graphs

The localisation of defects in computer programmes is essential in software engineering and is important in domain-specific data mining. Existing techniques which build on call-graph mining localise defects well, but do not scale for large software projects. This paper presents a hierarchical approach with good scalability characteristics. It makes use of novel call-graph representations, frequent subgraph mining and feature selection. It first analyses call graphs of a coarse granularity, before it zooms-in into more fine-grained graphs. We evaluate our approach with defects in the Mozilla Rhino project: In our setup, it narrows down the code a developer has to examine to about 6 % only