The Impact of Information Richness on Fault Localization

Abstract

SUMMARY Many recent studies have focused on leveraging rich information types to increase useful information for improving fault localization effectiveness. However, they rarely investigate the impact of information richness on fault localization to give guidance on how to enrich information for improving localization effectiveness. This paper presents the first systematic study to fill this void. Our study chooses four representative information types and investigates the relationship between their richness and the localization effectiveness. The results show that information richness related to frequency execution count involves a high risk of degrading the localization effectiveness, and backward slice is effective in improving localization effectiveness.