Effective Fault Localization using Probabilistic and Grouping Approach

Context: Fault localization (FL) is the key activity while debugging a program. Any improvement to this activity leads to significant improvement in total software development cost. There is an internal linkage between the program spectrum and test execution result. Conditional probability in statistics captures the probability of occurring one event in relationship to one or more other events. Objectives: The aim of this paper is to use the conception of conditional probability to design an effective fault localization technique. Methods: In the paper, we present a fault localization technique that derives the association between statement coverage information and test case execution result using condition probability statistics. This association with the failed test case result shows the fault containing the probability of that specific statement. Subsequently, we use a grouping method to refine the obtained statement ranking sequence for better fault localization. Results: We evaluated the effectiveness of proposed method over eleven open-source data sets. Our obtained results show that on average, the proposed CGFL method is 24.56% more effective than other contemporary fault localization methods such as D*, Tarantula, Ochiai, Crosstab, BPNN, RBFNN, DNN, and CNN. Conclusion: We devised an effective fault localization technique by combining the conditional probabilistic method with failed test case execution-based approach. Our experimental evaluation shows our proposed method outperforms the existing fault localization techniques.