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Article
A critical evaluation of spectrum-based fault localization techniques on a large-scale software system
Proceedings of the 2017 IEEE International Conference on Software Quality, Reliability and Security (QRS)
  • Fabian KELLER
  • Lars GRUNSKE
  • Simon HEIDEN
  • Antonio FILIERI
  • Andre Van HOORN
  • David LO, Singapore Management University
Publication Type
Conference Proceeding Article
Publication Date
8-2017
Abstract

In the past, spectrum-based fault localization (SBFL) techniques have been developed to pinpoint a fault location in a program given a set of failing and successful test executions. Most of the algorithms use similarity coefficients and have only been evaluated on established but small benchmark programs from the Software-artifact Infrastructure Repository (SIR). In this paper, we evaluate the feasibility of applying 33 state-of-the-art SBFL techniques to a large real-world project, namely ASPECTJ. From an initial set of 350 faulty version from the iBugs repository of ASPECTJ we manually classified 88 bugs where SBFL techniques are suitable. Notably, only 11 bugs of these bugs can be found after examining the 1000 most suspicious lines and on average 250 source code files need to be inspected per bug. Based on these results, the study showcases the limitations of current SBFL techniques on a larger program.

Identifier
10.1109/QRS.2017.22
City or Country
Prague; Czech Republic
Additional URL
http://doi.org./10.1109/QRS.2017.22
Citation Information
Fabian KELLER, Lars GRUNSKE, Simon HEIDEN, Antonio FILIERI, et al.. "A critical evaluation of spectrum-based fault localization techniques on a large-scale software system" Proceedings of the 2017 IEEE International Conference on Software Quality, Reliability and Security (QRS) (2017)
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/david_lo/153/