Research On Fault Localization Based On Enriching Contextual Information

Due to complexity and sheer size of software, it's practically impossible to create faultless software. Debugging is trying to find and fix bugs. In debugging practice, however, fault localization is one of the most difficult, most time-consuming and most tedious steps. In order to decrease the cost of debugging, numerous researchers try to automate the process of fault localization and improve its performance.The paper conducts and analyzes the research of fault localization in this filed. Due to most existing fault localization approaches usually utilize coverage information of test cases to identify a set of isolated statements responsible for a failure and do not show how these statements act on each other to cause the failure. To address this issue, we present a suspicious context based on fault localization approach to produce enhance contexts for these existing approaches. The approach consists of three essential parts: 1) Constructing suspicious context for the program. 2) Obtaining dynamic program execution information and program coverage information. 3) Rank the statements in the suspicious context according to their suspiciousness. The paper analyzes the deficiency of most existing fault localization techniques and provides the implementation and design of our opproach and its application. Experimental study on the Siemens suite demonstrates significant improvement in SFL. Furthermore, the experiment result shows that the performance of our approach in SFL is better than that of six maximal formulas of SFL under single-fault scenario. Based on the experimental results, it can be concluded that:1) Most existing fault localization approaches ignore the contextual information of the relationship and the propagation among suspicious statements, on account of that, they greatly restrict the performance of fault localization. 2) The approach raised in the paper effectively increases the performance of fault localization. 3) Test cases satisfying test adequacy criteria usually provide sufficient evidences that our approach is effective.The effectiveness of fault localization techneques is of great influence on the quality of software. The approach raised in the paper manifests high effectiveness in locating faults and makes contributions to the field of fault localization.