A Massively Parallel Approach to Automated Software Correctness Enhancement in Java

Abstract

Software product faults are an inevitable and an undesirable byproduct of any software development. Often hard to detect they are a major contributing factor to the overall development and support costs and a source of technical risk for the application as a whole. The criticality of the impact has resulted in several decades of non-stop iterative improvements, aimed at avoiding and detecting the faults through development and application of sophisticated automated testing and validation systems, Finding the exact source of error, creating a patch to fix it and validating it for production release is still a highly manual activity. In this paper we build upon the theoretical framework of relative correctness, which we have laid out in our previous work, and present a massively parallel automated tool implementing it in order to support root cause analysis and patch generation.