Towards Interactive Fault Localization Using Test Information

Finding the location of a fault is a central task of debugging. Typically, a developer employs an interactive process for fault localization. To accelerate this task, several approaches have been proposed to automate fault localization. In practice, testing-based fault localization (TBFL), which uses test information to locate faults, has become a research focus. However, experimental results reported in the literature showed that current automation of fault localization can only serve as a means to confirming the search space and prioritizing search sequences, not a substitute of the interactive fault localization process. In this paper, we propose an approach based on test information to support the entire interactive fault localization process. During this process, the information gathered from previous interaction steps can be used to provide the ranking of suspicious statements for the current interaction step. As a feasibility study of our approach, we performed an experiment on applying our approach together with some other TBFL approaches on the Siemens programs, which have been used in the literature. Our experimental results show the effectiveness of our approach.