Title
A similarity-aware approach to testing based fault localization
Abstract
Debugging is a time-consuming task in software development and maintenance. To accelerate this task, several approaches have been proposed to automate fault localization. In particular, testing based fault localization (TBFL), which utilizes the testing information to localize the faults, seem to be very promising. However, the similarity between test cases in the test suite has been ignored in the research on TBFL. In this paper, we investigate this similarity issue and propose a novel approach named similarity-aware fault localization (SAFL), which can calculate the suspicion probability of each statement with little impact by the similarity issue. To address and deal with the similarity between test cases, SAFL applies the theory of fuzzy sets to remove the uneven distribution of the test cases. We also performed an experimental study for two real-world programs at different size levels to evaluate SAFL together with another two approaches to TBFL. Experimental results show that SAFL is more effective than the other two approaches when the test suites contain injected redundancy, and SAFL can achieve a competitive result with normal test suites. SAFL can also be more effective than applying test suite reduction to current approaches to TBFL.
Year
DOI
Venue
2005
10.1145/1101908.1101953
ASE
Keywords
Field
DocType
similarity issue,test suite reduction,similarity-aware approach,experimental study,similarity-aware fault localization,test suite,fault localization,normal test suite,testing information,test case,fuzzy set,software development,debugging
Test suite,Computer science,Fuzzy set,Theoretical computer science,Redundancy (engineering),Test case,Software development,Debugging
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
1-58113-993-4
25
1.28
References 
Authors
14
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Dan Hao186341.59
Ying Pan2251.28
Lingming Zhang32726154.39
Wei Zhao41738.65
Hong Mei53535219.36
Jiasu Sun669432.02