Debugging through Evaluation Sequences: A Controlled Experimental Study

Predicate-based statistical fault-localization techniques locate fault-relevant predicates in a program by contrasting the statistics of the values of individual predicates between successful and failure-causing runs. While short-circuit evaluations are common in program execution, treating predicates as atomic units ignores this fact, masking out various types of important statistics. On the contrary, are such statistics useful for debugging? In this paper, we investigate experimentally the impact of the use of short-circuit evaluation information on fault localization. The results show that, by doing so, it significantly improves predicate-based statistical fault-localization techniques.