Bisection (software engineering): Difference between revisions

Revision as of 02:43, 11 September 2020

Revision as of 20:02, 3 August 2022

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Although the bisection method can be completed manually, one of its main advantages is that it can be easily automated.<ref name="Ness 97" /> It can thus fit into existing [[test automation]] processes: failures in exhaustive automated regression tests can trigger automated bisection to localize faults. Ness and Ngo focused on its potential in Cray's [[continuous delivery]]-style environment in which the automatically isolated bad changeset could be automatically excluded from builds.<ref name="Zeller 99">{{cite conference |first=Andreas |last=Zeller |title=Yesterday, my program worked. Today, it does not. Why? |date=1999 |conference=European Software Engineering Conference |___location=Toulouse, France |doi=10.1145/318774.318946}}</ref>

The revision control systems [[Fossil SCM|Fossil]], [[Git (software)|Git]] and [[Mercurial]] have built-in functionality for code bisection.<ref>{{Cite web|title=Fossil: Help: bisect|url=https://www.fossil-scm.org/fossil/help/bisect|access-date=2020-09-03|website=www.fossil-scm.org}}</ref><ref>{{cite web|url=https://git-scm.com/docs/git-bisect |title=git-bisect(1) |website=git-scm.com |accessdate=2017-08-05}}</ref><ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.selenic.com/mercurial/hg.1.html#bisect |title=hg |website=Selenic.com |date= |accessdate=2017-01-09}}</ref> The user can start a bisection session with a specified range of revisions from which the revision control system proposes a revision to test, the user tells the system whether the revision tested as "good" or "bad", and the process repeats until the specific "bad" revision has been identified. Other revision control systems, such as [[Bazaar (software)|Bazaar]] or [[Apache Subversion|Subversion]], support bisection through plugins<ref>{{cite web|url=http://doc.bazaar.canonical.com/plugins/en/bisect-plugin.html |title=bisect - Find the revision introducing a bug using a binary search — Bazaar 2.8.0dev1 documentation |website=Doc.bazaar.canonical.com |date= |accessdate=2017-01-09}}</ref> or external scripts.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://metacpan.org/module/INFINOIDdist/App-SVN-Bisect-1.1/view/bin/svn-bisect |title=svn-bisect |website=Metacpan.org |date= |accessdate=20172022-0108-0903}}</ref>

[[Phoronix Test Suite]] can do bisection automatically to find performance regressions.