Test case selection using multi-criteria optimization for effective fault localization

Abstract

As spectra-based fault localization techniques report suspicious statements by analyzing the coverage of test cases, the effectiveness of the results is highly dependent on the composition of test suites. This paper proposes an approach for selecting a subset of the passed test suite when a failure revealed by a failed test case. The goal is to obtain a more effective fault localization using a minimal number of test cases than using the originally given large number of test cases. A novelty is that a prioritization criterion and a selection criterion are defined. Different from previous studies, the failed trace is fully considered. The prioritization criterion partitions statements in the failed trace into more suspicious and less suspicious, and then ranks passed test cases by their ability in distinguishing the more suspicious statements from the less suspicious ones. The selection criterion selects the minimal passed test suite which can maximize the number of coverage equivalent classes in the failed trace, so as to distinguish the suspicious statements and meanwhile reduce the size of the test suite. Another novelty is that our approach turns the test case selection into a multi-criteria optimization to make the prioritization and the selection criteria complement each other. This approach was evaluated with 5 fault localization techniques, 8 subject programs and 35,392 test cases. The results show that the fault localization effectiveness can be significantly improved with less than 5% passed test cases. Our approach has advantages over the statement- based and vector-based test suite reduction approaches in both fault localization effectiveness and test suite reduction rate.