An Empirical Study of Fault Localization Families and Their Combinations 论文

详细信息

发表期刊/会议

IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering

发表日期

2019-01-10

发表年份

2019

摘要

The performance of fault localization techniques is critical to their adoption in practice. This paper reports on an empirical study of a wide range of fault localization techniques on real-world faults. Different from previous studies, this paper (1) considers a wide range of techniques from different families, (2) combines different techniques, and (3) considers the execution time of different techniques. Our results reveal that a combined technique significantly outperforms any individual technique (200 percent increase in faults localized in Top 1), suggesting that combination may be a desirable way to apply fault localization techniques and that future techniques should also be evaluated in the combined setting. Our implementation is publicly available for evaluating and combining fault localization techniques.