https://link-springer-com.ezproxy.ub.gu.se/content/pdf/10.1007/s10664-019-09781-y.pdf
I’ve came across this article from Empirical Software Engineering and it cought my attention. It describes a study of how to identify where a bug was introduced.
The article accurately observes that the defects are fixed, most often, in a place where they were NOT introduced. So, the question is whether we can find where the defects were introduced.
Several studies focused on understanding which release/commit introduced a specific defect. This article describes how to find this particular release. It is based on a theoretical framework of perfect tests, i.e. tests which can capture defects in releases where they were introduced. The authors of this study evaluate four different algorithms on two different open source projects. Their findings show that it is possible, to some extent, find the right release where the bug was introduced. Knowing the release and knowing which changes were introduced into the release, it is possible to narrow down the piece of code that contains the bug.
Very interesting work and looking forward to more studies in this area, in particular in the area of proprietary software!
