Priority Strategy of Software Fault Localization

Abstract: To a given test case, fault localization has to be proceeded when its output is wrong. A novel method is presented to localize a fault. Firstly, by analyzing the relation between testing requirement and test cases that satisfying it, some assistant test cases are selected out. Then, program slice is introduced to reduce the searching domain based on priority, which has been evaluated according to the occurrences in the selected slices. Two procedures, refining and augmenting, are followed here to fault localization: in the refining phase, the most suspicious codes are checked step by step; in the augmenting phase, more codes will be gradually considered on the basis of direct data dependency. At last, experimental studies are performed to illustrate the effectiveness of the technique