Spectrum-based Fault Localization (SBFL) has been widely studied as a debugging technique to reduce time and effort in locating faulty code in software. In SBFL, execution profiles (spectra) of pass and fail test cases are analyzed with SBFL metric to rank software code according to their likeliness to be faulty. However, there are significantly more pass test cases than fail test cases in typical test suites for faulty programs. The domination of pass test cases creates imbalance test suites that have a negative impact on the performance of SBFL. This is attributed to the fact that the execution profiles of fail test cases provide the essential information on the location of faulty code. In this paper, we propose to clone the spectra of fail test cases beyond balanced test suite to improve the performance of SBFL. Our empirical study shows that the proposed cloning method significantly improves the performance of commonly used SBFL metrics. Furthermore, we attempt to identify the amount of cloning required to achieve the optimal performance for the proposed cloning method.
Daniel et al. REF ] investigated an improved technique to clone the execution proles of fail tests beyond balanced test suite to improve the performance of spectrum-based fault localization.
Improving spectrum-based fault-localization through spectra cloning for fail test cases beyond balanced test suite
Contemporary engineering sciences
Computer Science