Research On Method-level Software Fault Localization Method

Currently,the growing of software development is very rapid.The scale of software is also increasing and the quality requirements of various application software are also getting higher and higher.In order to ensure the quality of large-scale software,people have proposed many methods of automatic fault location to assist programmers in debugging the software.However,the current research on fault location methods mostly focuses on program statement-level,which has relatively low accuracy.Once locating fails,the programmer cannot find the location of bug.To solve this problem,this paper completed the following works:First,the instrumentation of the function-level and the statement-level is performed through the abstract syntax tree of test program.Through the test case to implement the post-instrument program,we obtain the corresponding execution path of test program(function call sequence and statement execution sequence).Secondly,we implement O-methods and associated analysis methods which are both based on program spectrum by comparing the differences between function-level location and statement-level location.Experiments show that the two fault location method implemented in this paper are superior to the Tarantula for the function-level fault location.Then,we also implements a function-level fault location method based on weighted software behavior graph.Different from spectrum-based method,this method can express the complicated execution path more simply.We use the branch-and-bound search algorithm to mine the weighted software behavior graph,which obtains the fault signature list of the function.Experiments show that this method has a certain improvement in the function-level fault location efficiency compared with spectrum-based method.In addition,function call graphs are also used to improve the accuracy of function-level location,and an index for reviewing overhead coefficients is presented to indicate the efficiency of function-level location.Finally,for the three fault location methods in this paper,we analyze function-level location results through statement-level location results.Experiments show that this analysis method can also improve the efficiency of fault location compared with Tarantula.