Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Will Fault Localization Work For These Failures? An Automated Approach To Predict Effectiveness Of Fault Localization Tools, Tien-Duy B. Le, David Lo

David LO

Debugging is a crucial yet expensive activity to improve the reliability of software systems. To reduce debugging cost, various fault localization tools have been proposed. A spectrum-based fault localization tool often outputs an ordered list of program elements sorted based on their likelihood to be the root cause of a set of failures (i.e., their suspiciousness scores). Despite the many studies on fault localization, unfortunately, however, for many bugs, the root causes are often low in the ordered list. This potentially causes developers to distrust fault localization tools. Recently, Parnin and Orso highlight in their user study that many debuggers …