MuSim: Mutation-based Fault Localization Using Test Case Proximity

Abstract

Fault localization techniques aim to localize faulty statements using the information gathered from both passed and failed test cases. We present a mutation-based fault localization technique called MuSim. MuSim identifies the faulty statement based on its computed proximity to different mutants. We study the performance of MuSim by using four different similarity metrics. To satisfactorily measure the effectiveness of our proposed approach, we present a new evaluation metric called Mut_Score. Based on this metric, on an average, MuSim is 33.21% more effective than existing fault localization techniques such as DStar, Tarantula, Crosstab, Ochiai.