A Fault Localization Prioritization: Comparing Information Theoretic and Coverage Based Approaches

Test case prioritization techniques seek to maximise early fault detection. Fault localization seeks to use test cases already executed to help find the fault location. There is a natural interplay between the two techniques; once a fault is detected, we often switch focus to fault fixing, for which localization may be a first step. In this paper we introduce the Fault Localization Prioritization (FLP) problem, which combines prioritization and localization. We evaluate three techniques: a novel FLP technique based on information theory, FLINT (Fault Localization using Information Theory), that we introduce in this paper, a standard Test Case Prioritization (TCP) technique and a ‘test similarity technique ’ used in previous work. Our evaluation uses five different releases of four software systems. The results indicate that FLP and TCP can statistically significantly reduce fault localization costs for 73 % and 76 % of cases respectively and that FLINT significantly outperforms similarity-based localization techniques in 52 % of the cases considered in the study