An Innovative Framework for Coincidental Correctness Impacting on Fault Localization

Abstract

An important research aspect of Spectrum-Based Fault Localization (SBFL) is the influence factors of the effectiveness of suspiciousness formulas from the perspective of symmetry. Coincidental correctness is one of the most important factors impacting the effectiveness of suspiciousness formulas. The influence of fault localization by coincidental correctness has attracted a large amount of research in the perspective of empirical study; however, it can hardly be considered as sufficiently comprehensive when there are a large number of the symmetrical suspiciousness formulas. Therefore, we first develop an innovative theoretical framework with function derivation investigating suspiciousness formulas impacted by coincidental correctness. We define three types of relations between formulas affected by coincidental correctness: namely, improved type, invariant type and uncertain type. We investigated 30 suspiciousness formulas using this framework and group them into three categories. Furthermore, we conduct an empirical study to verify the effectiveness of SBFL affected by coincidental correctness on four relatively large C programs. We proved that coincidental correctness has a positive effect on 23 out of these 30 formulas, no effect on 5 of them, and the effect on the remaining 2 of them depend on certain conditions. The experimental results show that the effectiveness of some suspiciousness formulas can be enhanced and that of some suspiciousness formulas remain unchanged.