English

Configuration-dependent Fault Localization

Software Engineering 2019-11-20 v1

Abstract

In a buggy configurable system, configuration-dependent bugs cause the failures in only certain configurations due to unexpected interactions among features. Manually localizing configuration-dependent faults in configurable systems could be highly time-consuming due to their complexity. However, the cause of configuration-dependent bugs is not considered by existing automated fault localization techniques, which are designed to localize bugs in non-configurable code. Thus, their capacity for efficient configuration-dependent localization is limited. In this work, we propose CoFL, a novel approach to localize configuration-dependent bugs by identifying and analyzing suspicious feature interactions that potentially cause the failures in buggy configurable systems. We evaluated the efficiency of CoFL in fault localization of artificial configuration-dependent faults in a highly-configurable system. We found that CoFL significantly improves the baseline spectrum-based approaches. With CoFL, on average, the correctness in ranking the buggy statements increases more than 7 times, and the search space is significantly narrowed down, about 15 times.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1911.07906,
  title  = {Configuration-dependent Fault Localization},
  author = {Son Nguyen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1911.07906},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

2019 IEEE/ACM 41st International Conference on Software Engineering

R2 v1 2026-06-23T12:19:51.210Z