Abstract
Several approaches have been proposed to reduce debugging costs through
automated software fault diagnosis. Dynamic Slicing (DS) and Spectrum-based
Fault Localization (SFL) are popular fault diagnosis techniques and normally
seen as complementary. This paper reports on a comprehensive
study to reassess the effects of combining DS with SFL. With this
combination, components that are often involved in failing but seldom in passing
test runs could be located and their suspiciousness reduced.
Results show that the DS-SFL combination, coined
as Tandem-FL, improves the diagnostic accuracy up
to 73.7% (13.4% on average). Furthermore, results
indicate that the risk of missing faulty statements,
which is a DS?s key limitation, is not high ? DS
misses faulty statements in 9% of the 260 cases. To
sum up, we found that the DS-SFL combination
was practical and effective and encourage new SFL
techniques to be evaluated against that optimization.
Keywords
- Multidisciplinary Topics and Applications: Knowledge-based Software Engineering
- Multidisciplinary Topics and Applications: Validation and Verification
