Paper Info
Title
An Empirical Study on Higher-Order Mutation-Based Fault Localization
Abstract
Fault localization is one of the most expensive activities in software debugging. Mutation-based fault localization (MBFL) is a commonly studied technique that applied mutation analysis to find the location of faults in the programs. Previous studies showed that MBFL adopted First-Order-Mutants (FOMs) that could achieve promising results in single-fault localization, but it did not perform well in multiple-fault localization. Recently, Higher-Order-Mutants (HOMs) were proposed for modeling complex faults but whether HOMs can help in fault localization is still unknown. In this paper, we investigate the performance of MBFL with FOMs and HOMs on single- and multiple-fault localization. Moreover, to study the characteristics of HOMs, we divide HOMs into three groups (i.e. Accurate HOMs, Partially accurate HOMs, and Inaccurate HOMs) by considering different mutation locations. Based on the empirical results on 186 versions of six real-world programs, we find that (1) In single-fault localization, FOMs can achieve better performance than HOMs. (2) However, in multiple-fault localization, HOMs (2-HOMs) localize more faults than FOMs. (3) Furthermore, different types of HOMs have different fault localization effectiveness, where Accurate HOMs outperform the other two HOMs categories. Therefore, the researchers should propose methods to find HOMs more useful for fault localization.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1142/S0218194022500012
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SOFTWARE ENGINEERING AND KNOWLEDGE ENGINEERING
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Fault localization, mutation-based fault localization, higher-order-mutants, mutation testing, software debugging
Journal
32
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
01
0218-1940
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Haifeng Wang180694.25
Zheng Li254266.91
Yong Liu306.08
Xiang Chen411.36