Information Retrieval‐Based Techniques for Software Fault Localization

Abstract

This chapter introduces information retrieval (IR)-based fault localization techniques. One of the challenges of using bug tracking systems is that they often contain too many bug reports for developers to handle. Due to the textual nature of bug reports, IR techniques are often employed to solve the problem, and many IR-based fault localization techniques have been proposed in literature. A common fault localization process consists of four steps, that is, corpus creation, indexing, query construction, and retrieval and ranking. Top- k prediction accuracy, mean reciprocal rank, and mean average precision are widely used to evaluate the performance of IR-based fault localization techniques. The chapter aims to categorize studies on IR-based fault localization into three groups: text of current bug report only, text and history, and text and stack/execution traces. Existing IR-based fault localization techniques can be categorized based on data used in the fault localization process or IR techniques used.