Ruizhi Gao
ABSTRACT
In practice, a program may contain multiple bugs. The simultaneous presence of these bugs may deteriorate the effectiveness of existing fault-localization techniques to locate program bugs. While it is acceptable to use all failed and successful tests to identify suspicious code for programs with exactly one bug, it is not appropriate to use the same approach for programs with multiple bugs because the due-to relationship between failed tests and underlying bugs cannot be easily identified. One solution is to generate fault-focused clusters by grouping failed tests caused by the same bug into the same clusters. We propose MSeer - an advanced fault localization technique for locating multiple bugs in parallel. Our major contributions include the use of (1) a revised Kendall tau distance to measure the distance between two failed tests, (2) an innovative approach to simultaneously estimate the number of clusters and assign initial medoids to these clusters, and (3) an improved K-medoids clustering algorithm to better identify the due-to relationship between failed tests and their corresponding bugs. Case studies on 840 multiple-bug versions of seven programs suggest that MSeer performs better in terms of effectiveness and efficiency than two other techniques for locating multiple bugs in parallel.
- R. Gao and W. E. Wong, "MSeer - An Advanced Technique for Locating Multiple Bugs in Parallel," Transactions on Software Engineer, accepted on November 2017Google Scholar
Digital Library
- W. E. Wong, X. Li, P. A. Laplante, "Be More Familiar with Our Enemies and Pave the Way Forward: A Review of the Roles Bugs Played in Software Failures," Journal of Systems and Software, vol. 133, pp. 68--94, November 2017Google ScholarCross Ref
- W. E. Wong, R. Gao, Y. Li, R. Abreu and F. Wotawa, "A Survey on Software Fault Localization," IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, vol. 42, issue. 8, pp. 707--740, August 2016 Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- MSeer: an advanced technique for locating multiple bugs in parallel
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