Title: Evaluating and Improving Fault Localization Techniques

Advisors: Michael Ernst and Zach Tatlock

Abstract: Fault localization (FL) is the process of identifying which snippets of code need to be changed in order to fix a bug. Automated FL techniques typically instrument the faulty program, run the test suite, and search for statements that are disproportionately important to the failing tests' executions. Many such techniques have been proposed, but evaluations almost invariably focus on artificial faults, created by deliberately inserting faults into correct programs; these are not representative of real faults, and nobody has investigated whether they are good proxies for real faults when evaluating FL techniques.

We evaluated several previously-studied FL techniques on both artificial and real faults, and found that while previous results mostly replicated on artificial faults, most techniques performed almost indistinguishably on real faults. To discover what would make a FL technique do better on real faults, we identified a common structure behind all the techniques we considered, exhaustively analyzed all combinations of the different techniques' parameters, and found the causes of the most common failure modes. From this information, we were able to construct several new techniques that localize faults more effectively than any of the previous FL techniques we studied.

Place: 
CSE 305
When: 
Wednesday, May 17, 2017 - 12:30 to Friday, March 29, 2024 - 04:30