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Wed 12 Jul 2017 13:20 - 13:45 at Bren 1414 - Fault Localization and Mutation Testing Chair(s): Alex Orso

Manual debugging is notoriously tedious and time consuming. Therefore, various automated fault localization techniques have been proposed to help with manual debugging. Among the existing fault localization techniques, spectrum-based fault localization (SBFL) is one of the most widely studied techniques due to being lightweight. A focus of existing SBFL techniques is to consider how to differentiate program source code entities (i.e., one dimension in program spectra); indeed, this focus is aligned with the ultimate goal of finding the faulty lines of code. Our key insight is to enhance existing SBFL techniques by additionally considering how to differentiate tests (i.e., the other dimension in program spectra), which, to the best of our knowledge, has not been studied in prior work. We present PRFL, a lightweight technique that boosts spectrum-based fault localization by differentiating tests using PageRank algorithm. Given the original program spectrum information, PRFL uses PageRank to recompute the spectrum information by considering the contributions of different tests. Then, traditional SBFL techniques can be applied on the recomputed spectrum information to achieve more effective fault localization. Although simple and lightweight, PRFL has been demonstrated to outperform state-of-the-art SBFL techniques significantly (e.g., ranking 42% more real faults within Top-1 compared with the most effective traditional SBFL technique) with low overhead (e.g., around 2 minute average extra overhead on real faults) on 357 real faults from 5 Defects4J projects and 30692 artificial (i.e., mutation) faults from 87 GitHub projects, demonstrating a promising future for considering the contributions of different tests during fault localization.

Wed 12 Jul

Displayed time zone: Tijuana, Baja California change

13:20 - 15:00
Fault Localization and Mutation TestingTechnical Papers at Bren 1414
Chair(s): Alex Orso Georgia Institute of Technology
13:20
25m
Talk
Boosting Spectrum-Based Fault Localization using PageRank
Technical Papers
Mengshi Zhang University of Texas at Austin, USA, Xia Li University of Texas at Dallas, USA, Lingming Zhang , Sarfraz Khurshid University of Texas at Austin
DOI
13:45
25m
Talk
FLUCCS: Using Code and Change Metrics to Improve Fault Localization
Technical Papers
Jeongju Sohn KAIST, South Korea, Shin Yoo Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology
DOI
14:10
25m
Talk
Inferring Mutant Utility from Program Context
Technical Papers
René Just University of Massachusetts, USA, Bob Kurtz George Mason University, USA, Paul Ammann George Mason University, USA
DOI Pre-print
14:35
25m
Talk
Faster Mutation Analysis via Equivalence Modulo States
Technical Papers
Bo Wang Peking University, China, Yingfei Xiong Peking University, Yangqingwei Shi Peking University, Lu Zhang Peking University, Dan Hao Peking University
DOI Pre-print