Research On Coverage-Based Fault Localization For Object-Oriented Programs

Fault localization is always an expensive and time-consuming activity in the process of software development. Fault localization technology is widely used and has already ob-tained significant achievements in recent years. However, there still exists plenty of issues to address. With the convenience in software development brought by Object-oriented technol-ogy, new demands and challenges follow. Features of inheritance and polymorphism bring both powerful expressiveness and a number of fault types to OO programs. Inheritance and polymorphism make programs more complex. Therefore, we can not simply apply traditional fault localization technologies to OO programs. In addition to the fact that the important goal during software testing is to cause failures and locate faults, fault localization technologies with high accuracy are desperately needed. We try to propose a new kind of fault localization technology to reduce the work of programmer and improve the quality of software. This pa-per will introduce our research on fault localization for object-oriented programs. Our work includes:· Introduction for the appearance and realization of OO faults. To locate the faults accu-rately, we need to understand the characteristics of these faults clearly. On the basis of the analysis, we make an in-depth understanding of certain fault types in OO programs and the impact to fault localization brought by them.· Proposition of an algorithm to improve the accuracy in fault localization for object-oriented programs. By collecting both the code coverage and class information, we can make the result of fault localization more accurate and efficient.· Proposition of an evaluation framework of coverage-based fault localization for object-oriented programs. We designed a prototype tool to support the process of software testing. With the help of this tool, activities in software testing can be done automati-cally, such as code instrumentation, test cases execution and suspiciousness calcula-tion.