A novel variable-centric fault localization technique

• Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion Proceeedings pp. 252 - 253
• Main Authors: Kim, Jeongho, Kim, Jindae, Lee, Eunseok
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: New York, NY, USA ACM 27.05.2018
• Series: ACM Conferences
• Subjects: Software and its engineering > Software creation and management > Software verification and validation > Software defect analysis > Software testing and debugging; software debugging; spectrum-based fault localization; suspicious variable; software testing; variable-centric
• ISBN: 145035663X; 9781450356633
• DOI: 10.1145/3183440.3194956

Fault localization is one of the most important debugging tasks. Therefore, many techniques have already been developed to improve the efficiency. Among them, the spectrum-based fault localization technique is the most popular, and it has been the subject of 35% of total fault localization-related studies. SFL techniques leverage coverage spectra and localize a fault based on the coverage difference between passed and failed test cases. However, it is difficult to localize faults effectively when coverage differences are not clear. Therefore, we propose a novel variable-centric fault localization technique to improve performance of existing techniques. Proposed technique extracts suspicious variables and uses them to generate a suspicious ranked list. In an evaluation with 120 C faults, the proposed technique outperforms SFL techniques with the same similarity coefficient. The average Exam score of proposed techniques are reduced by 55% compared to SFL techniques.