Statistical Fault Localization with Reduced Program Runs

Abstract

International audienceA typical approach to software fault location is to pinpoint buggy statements by comparing the failing program runs with some successful runs. Most of the research works in this line require a large amount of failing runs and successful runs. Those required execution data inevitably contain a large number of redundant or noisy execution paths, and thus leads to a lower efficiency and accuracy of pinpointing. In this paper, we present an improved fault localization method by statistical analysis of difference between reduced program runs. To do so, we first use a clustering method to eliminate the redundancy in execution paths, next calculate the statistics of difference between the reduced failing runs and successful runs, and then rank the buggy statements in a generated bug report. The experimental results show that our algorithm works many times faster than Wang's, and performs better than competitors in terms of accuracy