Abstract: Large scale programs usually imply a large number of programming rules.However,if programmers violate those rules in the process of programming,it is possible to cause software defects.The function call rule is one kind of the typical implicit rules in programs.Previous work on mining function rules handle function calls in the body of a function definition as an itemset,and the constraints implied in function call sequences are not utilized,which can lead to high false positive rates.If the function call sequence information is exploited in the process of mining rules,it will effectively improve the accuracy of mining defects.This paper proposed a defect detection approach based on mining function call sequence patterns.In the approach,the suspected defects which violate function call sequence patterns are detected automatically,and the defects with high suspicious degrees are reported.Based on this approach,experiments were carried out in a group of open source projects.The expriment results show that this approach can effectively find defects which violate function call sequence patterns in programs,and reduce false positives.As a result,the overhead of veri-fying suspicious defects are also reduced.

Key words: Function call sequence,Sequence pattern mining,Defects detection