Faster mutation-based fault localization with a novel mutation execution strategy

Abstract

Checking program entities for finding faults is extremely tedious for developers. Fault localization techniques are designed to give a rank list of the probability that program entities incur faults to assist developers to locate faults. Mutation-based fault localization is a recently proposed fault localization approach via mutation analysis. With improved effectiveness, the mutation-based fault localization also brings huge execution cost. To reduce the execution cost of mutation-based fault localization technique, this paper proposes a dynamic mutation execution strategy which includes execution optimizations on both mutants and test cases. As fewer mutants and test cases are executed with the presented strategy, the fault localization process will be faster. The empirical studies show that mutation-based fault localization with the dynamic strategy we proposed, called Faster-MBFL, can reduce mutant-test execution times by 32.4% to 87% with keeping the fault localization accuracy unchanged; further, the additional run time required by utilizing our strategy can be ignored.