TANDEM: A Taxonomy and a Dataset of Real-World Performance Bugs

The detection of performance bugs, like those causing an unexpected execution time, has gained much attention in the last years due to their potential impact in safety-critical and resource-constrained applications. Much effort has been put on trying to understand the nature of performance bugs in different domains as a starting point for the development of effective testing techniques. However, the lack of a widely accepted classification scheme of performance faults and, more importantly, the lack of well-documented and understandable datasets makes it difficult to draw rigorous and verifiable conclusions widely accepted by the community. In this paper, we present TANDEM, a dual contribution related to real-world performance bugs. Firstly, we propose a taxonomy of performance bugs based on a thorough systematic review of the related literature, divided into three main categories: effects, causes and contexts of bugs. Secondly, we provide a complete collection of fully documented real-world performance bugs. Together, these contributions pave the way for the development of stronger and reproducible research results on performance testing.