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Article
Practitioners' expectations on automated fault localization
Proceedings of the 25th ACM International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis: ISSTA 2016, Saarbrucken, Germany; 2016 July 18-20
  • Pavneet Singh KOCHHAR
  • Xin XIA
  • David LO, Singapore Management University
  • Shanping LI
Publication Type
Conference Proceeding Article
Version
publishedVersion
Publication Date
7-2016
Abstract

Software engineering practitioners often spend significant amount of time and effort to debug. To help practitioners perform this crucial task, hundreds of papers have proposed various fault localization techniques. Fault localization helps practitioners to find the location of a defect given its symptoms (e.g., program failures). These localization techniques have pinpointed the locations of bugs of various systems of diverse sizes, with varying degrees of success, and for various usage scenarios. Unfortunately, it is unclear whether practitioners appreciate this line of research. To fill this gap, we performed an empirical study by surveying 386 practitioners from more than 30 countries across 5 continents about their expectations of research in fault localization. In particular, we investigated a number of factors that impact practitioners' willingness to adopt a fault localization technique. We then compared what practitioners need and the current state-of-research by performing a literature review of papers on fault localization techniques published in ICSE, FSE, ESEC-FSE, ISSTA, TSE, and TOSEM in the last 5 years (2011-2015). From this comparison, we highlight the directions where researchers need to put effort to develop fault localization techniques that matter to practitioners.

Keywords
  • Empirical study,
  • Fault localization,
  • Practitioners' expectations
Identifier
10.1145/2931037.2931051
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery, Inc
City or Country
Saarbrucken, Germany
Creative Commons License
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International
Additional URL
http://doi.org./10.1145/2931037.2931051
Citation Information
Pavneet Singh KOCHHAR, Xin XIA, David LO and Shanping LI. "Practitioners' expectations on automated fault localization" Proceedings of the 25th ACM International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis: ISSTA 2016, Saarbrucken, Germany; 2016 July 18-20 (2016)
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/david_lo/307/