Interactive fault localization using test information

  • Authors:

  • Dan Hao;Lu Zhang;Tao Xie;Hong Mei;Jia-Su Sun

  • Affiliations:

  • Key Laboratory of High Confidence Software Technologies, Ministry of Education, Institute of Software, School of Electronics Engineering and Computer Science, Peking University, Beijing, China;Key Laboratory of High Confidence Software Technologies, Ministry of Education, Institute of Software, School of Electronics Engineering and Computer Science, Peking University, Beijing, China;Department of Computer Science, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC;Key Laboratory of High Confidence Software Technologies, Ministry of Education, Institute of Software, School of Electronics Engineering and Computer Science, Peking University, Beijing, China;Key Laboratory of High Confidence Software Technologies, Ministry of Education, Institute of Software, School of Electronics Engineering and Computer Science, Peking University, Beijing, China

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Computer Science and Technology - Special section on trust and reputation management in future computing systmes and applications
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Debugging is a time-consuming task in software development. Although various automated approches have been proposed, they are not effective enough. On the other hand, in manual debugging, developers have difficulty in choosing breakpoints. To address these problems and help developers locate faults effectively, we propose an interactive fault-localization framework, combining the benefits of automated approaches and manual debugging. Before, the fault is found, this framework continuously recommends checking points based on statements suspicions, which are calculated according to the execution information of test cases and the feedback information from the developer at earlier checking points. Then we propose a naive approach, which is an initial implementation of this framework. However, with this naive approach or manual debugging, developers' wrong estimation of whether the faulty statement is executed before the checking point (breakpoint) may make the debugging process fail. So we propose another robust approach based on this framework, handling cases where developers make mistakes during the fault-localization process. We performed two experimental studies and the results show that the two interactive approaches are quite effective compared with existing fault-localization approaches. Moreover, the robust approach can help developers find faults when they make wrong estimation at some checking points.