The MADAG Strategy for Fault Location Techniques

Spectrum-based fault localization (SBFL), which utilizes spectrum information of test cases to calculate the suspiciousness of each statement in a program, can reduce developers' effort. However, applying redundant test cases from a test suite to fault localization incurs a heavy burden, especially in a restricted resource environment, and it is expensive and infeasible to inspect the results of each test input. Prioritizing/selecting appropriate test cases is important to enable the practical application of the SBFL technique. In addition, we must ensure that applying the selected tests to SBFL can achieve approximately the effectiveness of fault localization with whole tests. This paper presents a test case prioritization/selection strategy, namely the Minimal Aggregate of the Diversity of All Groups (MADAG). The MADAG strategy prioritizes/selects test cases using information on the diversity of the execution trace of each test case. We implemented and applied the MADAG strategy to 233 faulty versions of the Siemens and UNIX programs from the Software-artifact Infrastructure Repository. The experiments show that (1) the MADAG strategy uses only 8.99 and 14.27 test cases, with an average of 18, from the Siemens and UNIX test suites, respectively, and the SBFL technique has approximate effectiveness for fault localization on all test cases and outperforms the previous best test case prioritization method; (2) we verify that applying whole tests from the test suite may not achieve the better effectiveness in fault localization compared with the tests selected by MADAG strategy.

Automated summary

Spectrum-based fault localization (SBFL) uses spectrum information of test cases to calculate the suspiciousness of each statement in a program, helping reduce developers' effort. However, using redundant test cases for fault localization is burdensome, particularly in resource-constrained environments, and inspecting the results of each test input is expensive and impractical. Prioritizing/selecting appropriate test cases is crucial for practical application of SBFL, ensuring it achieves similar effectiveness as using all tests.