Search-based fault localization

  • Authors:

  • Shaowei Wang;David Lo;Lingxiao Jiang; Lucia;Hoong Chuin Lau

  • Affiliations:

  • School of Information Systems, Singapore Management University, Singapore;School of Information Systems, Singapore Management University, Singapore;School of Information Systems, Singapore Management University, Singapore;School of Information Systems, Singapore Management University, Singapore;School of Information Systems, Singapore Management University, Singapore

  • Venue:
  • ASE '11 Proceedings of the 2011 26th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

Many spectrum-based fault localization measures have been proposed in the literature. However, no single fault localization measure completely outperforms others: a measure which is more accurate in localizing some bugs in some programs is less accurate in localizing other bugs in other programs. This paper proposes to compose existing spectrum-based fault localization measures into an improved measure. We model the composition of various measures as an optimization problem and present a search-based approach to explore the space of many possible compositions and output a heuristically near optimal composite measure. We employ two search-based strategies including genetic algorithm and simulated annealing to look for optimal solutions and compare the effectiveness of the resulting composite measures on benchmark software systems. Compared to individual spectrum-based fault localization techniques, our composite measures perform statistically significantly better.