Bridging fault localisation and defect prediction

Abstract

Identifying the source of a program failure plays an integral role in maintaining software quality. Both fault localisation and defect prediction aim to locate faults: fault localisation aims to locate faults after they are revealed while defect prediction aims to locate yet-to-happen faults. Despite sharing a similar goal, fault localisation and defect prediction have been studied as separate topics, mainly due to the difference in available data to exploit. In our doctoral research, we aim to bridge fault localisation and defect prediction. Our work is divided into three parts: 1) applying defect prediction to fault localisation, i.e., DP2FL, 2) applying fault localisation to defect prediction, i.e., FL2DP, 3) consecutive application of DP2FL and FL2DP in a single framework. We expect the synergy between fault localisation and defect prediction not only to improve the accuracy of each process but to allow us to build a single model that gradually improve the overall software quality throughout the entire software development life-cycle.