Will Fault Localization Work For These Failures? An Automated Approach to Predict Effectiveness of Fault Localization Tools

Abstract—Debugging is a crucial yet expensive activity to improve the reliability of software systems. To reduce debug-ging cost, various fault localization tools have been proposed. A spectrum-based fault localization tool often outputs an ordered list of program elements sorted based on their likelihood to be the root cause of a set of failures (i.e., their suspiciousness scores). Despite the many studies on fault localization, unfortu-nately, however, for many bugs, the root causes are often low in the ordered list. This potentially causes developers to distrust fault localization tools. Recently, Parnin and Orso highlight in their user study that many debuggers do not find fault localization useful if they do not find the root cause early in the list. To alleviate the above issue, we build an oracle that could predict whether the output of a fault localization tool ca