2022/02/28 by Jason N. Gross, Théo Zimmermann, Gross, Jason +5 · 1 citation
Computer Science · #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Software Engineering (cs.SE) #Software Engineering Research #Software System Performance and Reliability #Software Testing and Debugging Techniques
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2202.13823
openalex publication_date 2022/02/28 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
As the adoption of proof assistants increases, there is a need for efficiency in identifying, documenting, and fixing compatibility issues that arise from proof assistant evolution. We present the Coq Bug Minimizer, a tool for reproducing buggy behavior with minimal and standalone files, integrated with coqbot to trigger automatically on Coq reverse CI failures. Our tool eliminates the overhead of having to download, set up, compile, and then explore and understand large developments: enabling Coq developers to easily obtain modular test-case files for fast experimentation. In this paper, we describe insights about how test-case reduction is different in Coq than in traditional compilers. We expect that our insights will generalize to other proof assistants. We evaluate the Coq Bug Minimizer on over 150 CI failures. Our tool succeeds in reducing failures to smaller test cases in roughly 75% of the time. The minimizer produces a fully standalone test case 89% of the time, and it is on average about one-third the size of the original test. The average reduced test case compiles in 1.25 seconds, with 75% taking under half a second.