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Zoltar: a spectrum-based fault localization tool

Published: 25 August 2009 Publication History

Abstract

Locating software components which are responsible for observed failures is the most expensive, error-prone phase in the software development life cycle. Automated diagnosis of software faults can improve the efficiency of the debugging process, and is therefore an important process for the development of dependable software. In this paper we present a toolset for automatic fault localization, dubbed Zoltar, which adopts a spectrum-based fault localization technique. The toolset provides the infrastructure to automatically instrument the source code of software programs to produce runtime data, which is subsequently analyzed to return a ranked list of likely faulty locations. Aimed at total automation (e.g., for runtime fault diagnosis), Zoltar has the capability of instrumenting the program under analysis with fault screeners, for automatic error detection. Using a small thread-based example program as well as a large realistic program, we show the applicability of the proposed toolset.

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cover image ACM Conferences
SINTER '09: Proceedings of the 2009 ESEC/FSE workshop on Software integration and evolution @ runtime
August 2009
64 pages
ISBN:9781605586816
DOI:10.1145/1596495
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 25 August 2009

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Author Tags

  1. automatic error detection
  2. runtime monitoring
  3. spectrum-based fault localization
  4. zoltar

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SINTER '09 Paper Acceptance Rate 8 of 8 submissions, 100%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 8 of 8 submissions, 100%

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  • (2024)Uniqueness of suspiciousness scores: towards boosting evolutionary fault localizationJournal of Software Engineering Research and Development10.5753/jserd.2024.365112:1Online publication date: 18-Oct-2024
  • (2024)Towards Efficient Program Repair with APR Tools Based on Genetic Algorithms2024 IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER)10.1109/SANER60148.2024.00097(896-901)Online publication date: 12-Mar-2024
  • (2024)A language-parametric test coverage framework for executable domain-specific languagesJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2024.111977211:COnline publication date: 2-Jul-2024
  • (2024)SFLVis: visual analysis of software fault localizationJournal of Visualization10.1007/s12650-024-00979-x27:4(585-602)Online publication date: 2-Apr-2024
  • (2024)A source model simplification method to assist model transformation debuggingSoftware Quality Journal10.1007/s11219-024-09676-232:3(961-984)Online publication date: 24-May-2024
  • (2023)Poster: Software Fault Localization as a Service (SFLaaS)2023 IEEE Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation (ICST)10.1109/ICST57152.2023.00056(482-485)Online publication date: Apr-2023
  • (2023)A Case Against Coverage-Based Program Spectra2023 IEEE Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation (ICST)10.1109/ICST57152.2023.00011(13-24)Online publication date: Apr-2023
  • (2023)Fault localization in DSLTrans model transformations by combining symbolic execution and spectrum-based analysisSoftware and Systems Modeling10.1007/s10270-023-01123-323:3(737-763)Online publication date: 29-Sep-2023
  • (2023)Software Fault Localization: an Overview of Research, Techniques, and ToolsHandbook of Software Fault Localization10.1002/9781119880929.ch1(1-117)Online publication date: 21-Apr-2023
  • (2022)An Approach for Automatically Repairing ATL Model Transformation ProgramsSoftware Engineering and Applications10.12677/SEA.2022.11613311:06(1297-1309)Online publication date: 2022
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