Combining Error Guessing and Logical Reasoning for Software Fault Localization via Deep Learning

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

Automated fault localization has been extensively studied to improve the effectiveness of software debugging. Existing automated fault localization methods neglect the guidance of the simple and easily available debugging information on fault localization. To bridge manual fault localization with automated fault localization, we propose a fault localization approach combining error guessing and logical reasoning via deep learning. The proposed approach simulates the actual debugging process. Specifically, developers’ debugging experience and context dependencies between methods are mapped into two different types of coverage matrices. The constructed matrices are fed to a convolutional neural network (CNN) to predict whether a method is buggy or not. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, we designed and constructed the empirical study on the widely used Defect4J datasets. With respect to the top-n ([Formula: see text]) metric, our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art DeepFL and other five methods including Ochai, Muse, MULTRIC, TraPT and FLUCSS. Particularly, compared with the above methods, our approach has an improvement of 5–182% for top-1. In terms of MFR and MAR, the proposed approach is slightly lower than the best DeepFL but better than the other five methods. The approach we presented achieving the unification of manual and automatic debugging can aid in the improvement of fault localization accuracy.