Tool Support for Fault Localization Using Architectural Models

Locating software faults is a problematic activity in many systems. Existing tool approaches usually work close to the system implementation, requiring the developer to perform tedious code analyses in which the amount of information she must manage is usually overwhelming. This problem calls for approaches able to work at higher abstraction levels than code. In this context, we present a tool approach, called FLABot, to assist fault-localization tasks. A novelty of FLABot is that it reasons about faults using software architecture information. Based on Use-case-maps and system logs, FLABot performs a heuristic search for possible faulty functions in the architecture, and then maps these functions to code sections. This allows the developer to quickly navigate large systems and spot code regions that may contain faults, which can be further debugged using conventional techniques. Our preliminary experiments have shown that FLABot is practical and reduces the efforts for discovering faults.