Effective Software Bug Localization Using Spectral Frequency Weighting Function

This paper presents an approach of bug localization using a frequency weighting function. In an existing approach, only binary information of execution count from test executions is used. Information of each program statement being executed and not executed by a particular test is used; indicated by 1 and 0 respectively. In our proposed approach, frequency execution count of each program statement executed by a respective test is used. We evaluate several well-known spectra metrics using our proposed approach and the existing approach (using binary information of execution count) on two test suites; Siemens Test Suite and Unix datasets. We show that the bug localization performance is improved by using our proposed approach. We conduct statistical test and show that the improved bug localization performance using our approach (using frequency execution count) is statistically significant than using the existing approach (using binary information of execution count).