CGT-FL: using cooperative game theory to effective fault localization in presence of coincidental correctness

Abstract

In this article we emphasize that most of the faults, appearing in real-world programs, are complicated and there exists a high interaction between faulty and other correlated statements, that is likely to cause coincidental correctness in many cases. To effectively diminish the negative impact of coincidentally correct tests on localization effectiveness, we suggest analyzing the combinatorial effect of program statements on the failure. To this end, we develop a new framework, CGT-FL, for evaluation and ranking program statements in a manner that statements which have strong discriminatory power as a group but are weak as individuals could be identified. The framework firstly evaluates the interactivity degree of each statement according to its influence on the intricate interrelation among statements by a Shapley value-based cooperative game-theoretic method. Then, statements are selected in a forward way by considering both interactivity and relevance measures. To verify the effectiveness of CGT-FL, we provide the results of our extensive experiments with different subject programs, containing seeded and real faults. The experimental results are then compared with those provided by different fault localization techniques for both single-fault and multiple-fault programs. The results prove the outperformance of CGT-FL compared to state-of-the-art techniques.