Welcome to DSD-Crasher

DSD = Dynamic-Static-Dynamic

Abstract

DSD-Crasher is a bug finding tool that follows a three-step approach to program analysis:
D. Capture the program's intended execution behavior with dynamic invariant detection. The derived invariants exclude many unwanted values from the program's input domain.
S. Statically analyze the program within the restricted input domain to explore many paths.
D. Automatically generate test cases that focus on verifying the results of the static analysis. Thereby confirmed results are feasible.

This three-step approach yields benefits compared to past two-step combinations in the literature. In our evaluation with third-party applications, we demonstrate higher precision over tools that lack a dynamic step and higher efficiency over tools that lack a static step.

Overview

DSD-Crasher adds a dynamic analysis step at the front of the static-dynamic pipeline used by Check 'n' Crash. The goal of this first dynamic step is to infer the testee's intended behavior from existing test cases. DSD-Crasher feeds inferred invariants to Check 'n' Crash by annotating the testee. This enables DSD-Crasher to suppress bug warnings that are not relevant to the intended uses of the program. In this example, the inferred invariant excludes negative input values. DSD-Crasher therefore does not produce a warning about -1 causing an exception as Check 'n' Crash might do.

Download

Download DSD-Crasher--it's free.

Technical Talks

PDF and PPT overview slides updated on October 18, 2007.
Video of the Microsoft Research talk I gave in Redmond, Washington on 28 August 2007.
PDF slides I used at ISSTA in Portland, Maine on July 20, 2006.
Video of the Google tech talk I gave in Mountain View, California on July 13, 2006.
PDF slides I used at ICSE for the Check 'n' Crash talk in St. Louis, Missouri on May 20, 2005.

Technical Papers

This invited overview paper compares DSD-Crasher to its predecessors Check 'n' Crash and JCrasher. It appeared in the Proceedings of the First International Conference on Tests And Proofs (TAP), February 2007.
The DSD-Crasher paper appeared in the Proceedings of the International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA), July 2006.
DSD-Crasher is a successor of and contains Check 'n' Crash. The Check 'n' Crash paper appeared in the Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), May 2005.
Check 'n' Crash is a successor of and contains JCrasher. The JCrasher paper appeared in Software--Practice & Experience, September 2004.

Awards

The DSD-Crasher paper received an ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award at ISSTA 2006.

People

Acknowledgment

This product includes software developed by the Apache Software Foundation (http://www.apache.org/).
See our license page for a list of third party components included in DSD-Crasher.