Presenter: Maria Kechagia (joint work with Xavier Devroey, Annibale Panichella, Georgios Gousios, Arie van Deursen)
Date: 24 July 2019

Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) typically come with (implicit) usage constraints. The violations of these constraints (API misuses) can lead to software crashes. Even though there are several tools that can detect API misuses, most of them suffer from a very high rate of false positives. We introduce Catcher, a novel API-misuse detection approach that combines static exception propagation analysis with automatic search-based test case generation to effectively and efficiently pinpoint crash-prone API misuses in client applications. We validate Catcher against 21 Java applications, targeting misuses of the Java platform’s API. Our results indicatethat Catcher is able to generate test cases that uncover 243 (unique) API misuses that result in crashes. Our empirical evaluation shows that Catcher can detect a large number of misuses (77 cases) that would remain undetected by the traditional coverage-based test case generator EvoSuite. Additionally, Catcher is on average eight times faster than EvoSuite in generating test cases for the identified misuses. Finally, we find that the majority of the exceptions triggered by Catcher are unexpected to developers i.e., not only unhandled in the source code but also not listed in the documentation of the client applications.

Dr. Maria Kechagia is a research fellow at CREST, UCL. Previously, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Delft University of Technology and a member of the Software Engineering Research Group. She finished her Ph.D. in Software Engineering in the Department of Management Science and Technology, at the Athens University of Economics and Business, under the supervision of Prof. Diomidis Spinellis. Before that, she pursued her MSc in Computing (Software Engineering) at Imperial College London and her BSc in Management Science and Technology at the Athens University of Economics and Business. Her research interests lie in the areas of software engineering, software verification, crash data analytics, and programming languages. In particular, her current research focuses on combining static analysis and software testing to effectively and efficiently repair API-related bugs in software programs. Her research work has been published in leading peer-reviewed software engineering conferences and journals including ICSE, ISSTA, MSR, EMSE, and JSS.