Mutation Based Feature Localization
Jan Malburg, Emmanuelle Encrenaz, Görschwin Fey · 2014
The complexity of modern chip designs is rapidly increasing. More and more blocks from old designs are reused and third party IP is licensed to fulfill strict time-to-market constraints. Often, poor documentation of such blocks makes improvements and extensions of the blocks a difficult time consuming task. In this paper we present a technique for automatically localizing the parts of the code which are relevant for a feature. With this a developer can better understand the design and, consequently, can adjust the design more efficiently. The presented approach uses mutants changing the code of the design at a certain location. The code changed by a mutant is considered to be related to a feature if the mutant is killed while the feature is used. The use cases are generated using an automatic approach. This approach is based on a description specifying how the different features are used. Compared to two previous approaches the manual work is significantly reduced and the localization is of similar or even better quality.