An Empirical Study of Fault Localization Families and Their Combinations
This work addresses the need for more effective fault localization methods in software engineering, though it is incremental as it builds on existing techniques through combination.
This paper tackles the problem of improving fault localization techniques by empirically studying a wide range of them and their combinations on real-world faults, finding that a combined technique significantly outperforms individual ones with a 200% increase in faults localized in the Top 1.
The performance of fault localization techniques is critical to their adoption in practice. This paper reports on an empirical study of a wide range of fault localization techniques on real-world faults. Different from previous studies, this paper (1) considers a wide range of techniques from different families, (2) combines different techniques, and (3) considers the execution time of different techniques. Our results reveal that a combined technique significantly outperforms any individual technique (200% increase in faults localized in Top 1), suggesting that combination may be a desirable way to apply fault localization techniques and that future techniques should also be evaluated in the combined setting. Our implementation is publicly available for evaluating and combining fault localization techniques.