Research On Multi-Fault Localization Based On Higher-Order-Mutants

In recent years,with the development of the software industry,the number and complexity of software systems continue to increase,and the program faults become more and more complicated.The time and labor cost required to find and repair these program faults are also higher than before.Automated fault localization technology is designed to automatically locate faults in the program without requiring or less manual participation.It plays a significant role on improving the software quality and reducing the cost of program debugging.In recent years,many researchers paid a lot of attention on automated fault localization technology.Mutation-based Fault Localization(MBFL)has been proposed in recent years as an important automated fault localization technology based on mutation testing.The theoretical basis of MBFL is that mutants can simulate program faults,or are close to potential fix of faulty programs.The currently widely studied MBFL technology is based on first-order-mutants.Since the first-order-mutants can only simulate simple faults,the existing MBFL technology has excellent fault location accuracy in simple artificial fault program.However,the real faults in the industrial software are often composed of multiple faulty statements fault,and the existing first-order-mutants can't simulate multi-faults,which leads to the low fault localization accuracy of the existing MBFL technology in these programs.In order to solve this problem,this paper combines higher-order mutation technique with the traditional MBFL,and proposes a novel multiple fault localization technology based on higher-order-mutants.Specifically,the main research work of this paper includes the following three aspects:1.This paper conducts large-scale empirical studies on the relationship between higher-order-mutants and multi-fault localization accuracy.This paper studies the performance of first-order-mutants and higher-order-mutants in multi-fault scenarios,and then classifies higher-order-mutants to explore which type of higher-order-mutants is more effective in multi-fault localization.2.Based on the findings of empirical studies,this paper proposes a higher-order mutation based multi-fault localization technique.In view of the difference between higher-order-mutants and first-order-mutants in fault localization,this paper proposes two strategies to generate higher-order-mutants and three methods to calculate the statements'suspicious value.The experimental results show that the higher-order mutation based multi-fault localization technique proposed in this paper performs better than the traditional MBFL techniques in the terms of fault localization accuracy in multiple fault programs.3.Based on the above research work,this paper designs and implements a higher-order mutation based fault localization prototype system,which lays a foundation for the further popularization and using of this method.