Variability Fault Localization: A Benchmark
This addresses the costly and underexplored issue of debugging in SPL systems for software engineers, but it is incremental as it focuses on creating a benchmark rather than a new localization method.
The paper tackles the problem of variability fault localization in Software Product Line (SPL) systems, which is challenging due to failures caused by feature combinations, and proposes a benchmark with 1,570 buggy versions across six SPL systems to establish baseline performance results.
Software fault localization is one of the most expensive, tedious, and time-consuming activities in program debugging. This activity becomes even much more challenging in Software Product Line (SPL) systems due to the variability of failures in SPL systems. These unexpected behaviors are caused by variability faults which can only be exposed under some combinations of system features. Although localizing bugs in non-configurable code has been investigated in-depth, variability fault localization in SPL systems still remains mostly unexplored. To approach this challenge, we propose a benchmark for variability fault localization with a large set of 1,570 buggy versions of six SPL systems and baseline variability fault localization performance results. Our hope is to engage the community to propose new and better approaches to the problem of variability fault localization in SPL systems.