Debugging in Parallel or Sequential: An Empirical Study

Abstract

Faults need to be identified, localized, and removed from programs. Empirical studies show that coverage-based faults localizations effectively target bugs, even in the presence of multiple faults. Debugging is a time-consuming activity and thus it is beneficial to accelerate the process by employing appropriate techniques. The need for speeding up the debugging process is even more immense when the program under test contains multiple faults. A program with multiple faults can be debugged in parallel where each sub-process specifically targets localizing one of the bugs. The immediate research question that arises here is that how significant is the improvement and performance achieved when debugging is performed in parallel compared to the sequential fault localization strategy. This paper investigates and compares the performance of parallel and sequential debugging in effectively localizing faults where the performance is measured according to fault localization cost required by each strategy. Based on the experimental study of several open source Java programs conducted in this paper, we observe that debugging when is performed in parallel outperforms sequential strategy in terms of the total cost.

A Comprehensive Empirical Investigation on Failure Clustering in Parallel Debugging

“…The more the faults, the lower proportion of failed test cases caused by each fault to all failed test cases 16 . However, the intuition of designing risk evaluation formulas in SBFL is to assign higher suspiciousness to statements that are covered by more failed test cases [69,70], which would be disturbed by the presence of multiple faults, and the degree of disturbance magnifies as the number of faults increases. Zheng et al presented a similar opinion in [71], they claimed when there is only one faulty statement, it is more likely to be covered by more failing executions, whereas the failing executions are diluted by multiple faults so less accurate results are obtained.…”