Cost-effective testing based fault localization with distance based test-suite reduction

作     者：Xingya WANG Shujuan JIANG Pengfei GAO Xiaolin JU Rongcun WANG Yanmei ZHANG 

作者机构：School of Computer Science and Technology China University of Mining and Technology School of Computer Science and Technology Nantong University Guangxi Key Laboratory of Trusted Software Guilin University of Electronic Technology 

出 版 物：《Science China(Information Sciences)》 (中国科学:信息科学(英文版))

年 卷 期：2017年第60卷第9期

页      面：163-177页

核心收录：

学科分类：08[工学] 0835[工学-软件工程] 081202[工学-计算机软件与理论] 0812[工学-计算机科学与技术（可授工学、理学学位）] 

基　　金：supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 61673384, 61502497, 61562015) Guangxi Key Laboratory of Trusted Software (Grant Nos. kx201609, kx201532) Scientific Research Innovation Project for Graduate Students of Jiangsu Province (Grant No. KYLX 1390) Science and Technology Program of Xuzhou (Grant No. KC15SM051) China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (Grant No. 2015M581887) 

主　　题：program debugging fault localization test-suite reduction distance estimation category partition 

摘      要：The aim of testing based fault localization(TBFL) involves improving the efficiency of program debugging by providing developers with a guide of ranked list of suspicious statements. However, collection of testing information of the whole original test-suite is excessively expensive or even infeasible for developers to conduct TBFL. Traditional test-suite reduction(TSR) techniques are utilized to reduce the size of testsuite. However, they entail a time-consuming process of whole testing information collection. In this study, the distance based test-suite reduction(DTSR) technique is proposed. As opposed to the whole testing information,the distances among the test cases are used to guide the process of test-suite reduction in DTSR. Hence, it is only necessary to collect the testing information for a portion of the test cases for TSR and TBFL. The investigation on the Siemens and SIR benchmarks reveals that DTSR can effectively reduce the size of the given test-suite as well as the time cost of TBFL. Additionally, the fault locating effectiveness of DTSR results is close to that when the whole test-suite is used.