Abstract

A variety of expensive software maintenance and testing tasks require a comparison of the behaviors of program versions. Program spectra have recently been proposed as a heuristic for use in performing such comparisons. To assess the potential usefulness of spectra in this context, we conducted an experiment that examined the relationship between program spectra and program behavior, and empirically compared several types of spectra. This paper reports the results of that experiment. 1 Introduction A variety of software testing and maintenance tasks require us to compare the behaviors of multiple program versions. For example, when we modify a program, we use regression testing to compare the behavior of the modified version to the behavior of its previous version, in the hope of detecting faults caused by the modifications. Similarly, when programs exhibit "regression failures" (behavioral failures that did not occur in preceding versions), we compare the behaviors of versions in the...

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