A Test-Suite Reduction Approach for Improving Path-Based Fault-Localization Effectiveness

Abstract

Path-based fault-localization technique is proved to be more effective than coverage-based fault localization because of analyzing the semantics of a program. Most previous work focused on investigating coverage-based test-suite reduction approach for fault localization. But it is not suitable for path-based fault localization, because it only analyzes coverage information, and does not take the execution path information of test cases into account. In this paper, we propose a test-suite reduction approach for path-based fault localization. This approach analyzes the concrete execution path of test cases. The experimental results show that the proposed method works well in improving the effectiveness of path-based fault localization.