An observation-based model for fault localization

  • Authors:

  • Rui Abreu;Peter Zoeteweij;Arjan J. C. van Gemund

  • Affiliations:

  • Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands;Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands;Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands

  • Venue:
  • WODA '08 Proceedings of the 2008 international workshop on dynamic analysis: held in conjunction with the ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA 2008)
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Automatic techniques for helping developers in finding the root causes of software failures are extremely important in the development cycle of software. In this paper we study a dynamic modeling approach to fault localization, which is based on logic reasoning over program traces. We present a simple diagnostic performance model to assess the influence of various parameters, such as test set size and coverage, on the debugging effort required to find the root causes of software failures. The model shows that our approach unambiguously reveals the actual faults, provided that sufficient test cases are available. This optimal diagnostic performance is confirmed by numerical experiments. Furthermore, we present preliminary experiments on the diagnostic capabilities of this approach using the single-fault Siemens benchmark set. We show that, for the Siemens set, the approach presented in this paper yields a better diagnostic ranking than other well-known techniques.