Creating a program problem signature data base during program testing to diagnose problems during program use

摘要

When test cases cause a computer program to fail, system information, such as a stack trace, is collected. The information is stored in a problem signature database along with a description of the test case that caused the failure. If the program fails when being used normally, the equivalent system information is collected and compared with the system information in the database. The entries in the database are ranked depending on how similar they are to the collected data and the test case descriptions are presented to the user.