Spectrum-based fault localization tool with test case preprocessor

Spectrum-based Fault Localization (SBFL) is an emerging debugging technique that assists software developers to locate faulty code in software. By utilizing code execution information (spectra), SBFL metrics rank lines of codes in software according to their likeliness to be faulty. However, recent studies showed that contradicting, duplicated or noisy spectra may deteriorate the ranking accuracy of SBFL metrics. In this paper, we propose and develop a novel SBFL tool with test case preprocessor to filter out test cases with contradicting, duplicated or other noisy spectra. Case studies conducted on real life faulty programs show that the proposed SBFL tool with test case preprocessor has successfully improved the performance of SBFL metrics in majority of the cases studied.