How Significant Is the Effect of Faults Interaction on Coverage Based Fault Localizations?

Xiaozhen XueAdvanced Empirical Software Testing GroupDepartment of Computer Science Texas Tech University

10.1.2013

Outline

•Introduction

•Research Questions

•Experimental procedure

•Data analysis

•Discussion

•Conclusion

Introduction

•Software testing is an important process in software life cycle.

•Fault localization is a major activity in software testing.

•Fault localization is time consuming and expensive.

Introduction

•Coverage based fault localization

Introduction

•example

Introduction

•Coverage based fault localization techniques is effect when single fault in presence.

•It is a common belief that the coverage based fault localization techniques are less effective in the presence of multiple faults.

Introduction

•Motivation:

Empirically investigate the effectiveness of Coverage Based Faults Localization when multiple faults exist in the program.

Research Questions

•RQ1: How prevalent is the fault interferences phenomenon in the object-oriented programming languages such as Java?

•RQ2: How significant is the influence of fault interactions on debugging cost?

•RQ3: Do the frequencies of fault interferences vary for different ranking metrics?

•RQ4: How different is the frequency of observing fault interference instances for various number of faults?

•RQ5: How different is the frequency of observing fault interference instances for various type of faults?

Experimental procedure

•Subjects programs

Experimental procedure

•Multiple faults

Experimental procedure

•metrics

Experimental procedure

•Metrics proposed in our previous work

Data Analysis

•Data visualization

Data Analysis

•The significance of faults interactions

Data Analysis

•The significance of faults interactions

Data Analysis

•The significance of faults interactions

Data Analysis

•The significance of faults interactions

Discussion

•The prevalence of faults interference

Discussion

•The prevalence of faults interference

Data Analysis

•The roles of ranking metrics

Conclusion

•The coverage-based fault localization techniques are still effective in localizing faults in the presence of multiple faults.

•The effect of fault interactions on debugging cost is negligible and statistically insignificant.

•The frequency of observing fault interference instances differ for various ranking metrics.

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