(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2011)
Baah, George K.; Podgurski, Andy; Harrold, Mary Jean
Finding the cause of a program’s failure from
a causal-analysis perspective requires, for each statement,
tests that cover the statement and tests that do not cover
the statement. However, in practice the composition of test
suites can be detrimental to effective fault localization for
two reasons: (1) lack-of-balance, which occurs if the coverage
characteristics of tests that cover a statement differ from
tests that do not cover the statement, and (2) lack-of-overlap,
which occurs if test cases that reach the control-dependence
predecessor of a statement cover or do not cover the statement.
This paper addresses these two problems. First, the paper
presents empirical results that show that, for effective fault
localization, the composition of test suites should exhibit balance
and overlap. Second, the paper presents new techniques to
overcome these problems—matching to address lack-of-balance
and causal-effect imputation to overcome lack-of-overlap—and
presents empirical evidence that these techniques increase the
effectiveness of fault localization.