Diagnosing Software Faults Using Multiverse Analysis
Diagnosing Software Faults Using Multiverse Analysis
Prantik Chatterjee, Abhijit Chatterjee, Jose Campos, Rui Abreu, Subhajit Roy
Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main track. Pages 1629-1635.
https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2020/226
Spectrum-based Fault Localization (SFL) approaches aim to efficiently localize faulty components from examining program behavior. This is done by collecting the execution patterns of various
combinations of components and the corresponding outcomes into a spectrum. Efficient fault localization depends heavily on the quality of the spectra. Previous approaches, including the current
state-of-the-art Density- Diversity-Uniqueness (DDU) approach, attempt to generate “good” test-suites by improving certain structural properties of the spectra. In this work, we propose a different
approach, Multiverse Analysis, that considers multiple hypothetical universes, each corresponding to a scenario where one of the components is assumed to be faulty, to generate a spectrum that
attempts to reduce the expected worst-case wasted effort over all the universes. Our experiments show that the Multiverse Analysis not just improves the efficiency of fault localization but also achieves better coverage and generates smaller test-suites over DDU, the current state-of-the-art technique. On average, our approach reduces the developer effort over DDU by over 16% for more than 92% of the instances. Further, the improvements over DDU are indeed statistically significant on the paired Wilcoxon Signed-rank test.
Keywords:
Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Diagnosis and Abductive Reasoning
Multidisciplinary Topics and Applications: Knowledge-based Software Engineering