Fault localization based on statement frequency

Abstract

Spectrum-based automatic fault localization techniques play an important role in facilitating the quick and accurate localization of faults in programs. Unfortunately, since these techniques are based on the binary coverage information, counting only the coverage of statements in each execution and ignoring the statement frequency information, their diagnostic accuracies are inherently limited, especially when faults occur in the iteration statements or loop bodies. To address this problem, we introduce statement frequency conception into spectrum-based fault localization (SFL) and then propose a fault localization method based on statement frequency (FLSF). We also conduct a case study involving seven programs in Siemens suite and two risk evaluation formulas to compare the effectiveness of the proposed method against Tarantula. The experimental results show that our method outperforms Tarantula in most situations with regard to stability and effectiveness.