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A similarity-aware approach to testing based fault localization

Published: 07 November 2005 Publication History

Abstract

Debugging is a time-consuming task in software development and maintenance. To accelerate this task, several approaches have been proposed to automate fault localization. In particular, testing based fault localization (TBFL), which utilizes the testing information to localize the faults, seem to be very promising. However, the similarity between test cases in the test suite has been ignored in the research on TBFL. In this paper, we investigate this similarity issue and propose a novel approach named similarity-aware fault localization (SAFL), which can calculate the suspicion probability of each statement with little impact by the similarity issue. To address and deal with the similarity between test cases, SAFL applies the theory of fuzzy sets to remove the uneven distribution of the test cases. We also performed an experimental study for two real-world programs at different size levels to evaluate SAFL together with another two approaches to TBFL. Experimental results show that SAFL is more effective than the other two approaches when the test suites contain injected redundancy, and SAFL can achieve a competitive result with normal test suites. SAFL can also be more effective than applying test suite reduction to current approaches to TBFL.

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cover image ACM Conferences
ASE '05: Proceedings of the 20th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering
November 2005
482 pages
ISBN:1581139934
DOI:10.1145/1101908
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 07 November 2005

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Author Tags

  1. debugging
  2. fault localization
  3. fuzzy set
  4. maintenance

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Overall Acceptance Rate 82 of 337 submissions, 24%

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  • (2025)A Systematic Mapping Study of the Metrics, Uses and Subjects of Diversity‐Based Testing TechniquesSoftware Testing, Verification and Reliability10.1002/stvr.191435:2Online publication date: 17-Jan-2025
  • (2024)A deep semantics-aware data augmentation method for fault localizationInformation and Software Technology10.1016/j.infsof.2024.107409168(107409)Online publication date: Apr-2024
  • (2023)Mitigating the Effect of Class Imbalance in Fault Localization Using Context-aware Generative Adversarial Network2023 IEEE/ACM 31st International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC)10.1109/ICPC58990.2023.00045(304-315)Online publication date: May-2023
  • (2023)Software multiple-fault localization using particle swarm optimization via genetic operationJournal of King Saud University - Computer and Information Sciences10.1016/j.jksuci.2023.02.02335:4(21-35)Online publication date: Apr-2023
  • (2023)Model-domain failing test augmentation with Generative Adversarial NetworksExpert Systems with Applications10.1016/j.eswa.2023.121901(121901)Online publication date: Oct-2023
  • (2023)ContextAug: model-domain failing test augmentation with contextual informationFrontiers of Computer Science10.1007/s11704-023-2521-218:2Online publication date: 13-Sep-2023
  • (2022)Improving Fault Localization Using Model-domain Synthesized Failing Test Generation2022 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME)10.1109/ICSME55016.2022.00026(199-210)Online publication date: Oct-2022
  • (2021)An Empirical Study of Fault Localization Families and Their CombinationsIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2019.289210247:2(332-347)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2021
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  • (2020)Causal testingProceedings of the ACM/IEEE 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering10.1145/3377811.3380377(87-99)Online publication date: 27-Jun-2020
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