SemBIC: Semantic-Aware Identification of Bug-Inducing Commits

Debugging can be much facilitated if one can identify the evolution commit that introduced the bug leading to a detected failure (aka. bug-inducing commit, BIC). Although one may, in theory, locate BICs by executing the detected failing test on various historical commit versions, it is impractical when the test cannot be executed on some of those versions. On the other hand, existing static techniques often assume the availability of additional information such as patches and bug reports, or the applicability of predefined heuristics like commit chronology. However, these approaches are ineffective when such assumptions do not hold, which are often the case in practice. To address these limitations, we propose SEMBIC to identify the BIC of a bug by statically tracking the semantic changes in the execution path prescribed by the failing test across successive historical commit versions. Our insight is that the greater the semantic changes a commit introduces concerning the failing execution path of a target bug, the more likely it is to be the BIC. To distill semantic changes relevant to the failure, we focus on three fine-grained semantic properties. We evaluate the performance of SEMBIC on a benchmark containing 199 real-world bugs from 12 open-source projects. We found that SEMBIC can identify BICs with high accuracy – it ranks the BIC as top 1 for 88 out of 199 bugs, and achieves an MRR of 0.520, outperforming the state-of-the-art technique by 29.4% and 13.6%, respectively.