English

Simple Fault Localization using Execution Traces

Software Engineering 2025-03-07 v1

Abstract

Traditional spectrum-based fault localization (SBFL) exploits differences in a program's coverage spectrum when run on passing and failing test cases. However, such runs can provide a wealth of additional information beyond mere coverage. Working with thousands of execution traces of short programs submitted to competitive programming contests and leveraging machine learning and additional runtime, control-flow and lexical features, we present simple ways to improve SBFL. We also propose a simple trick to integrate context information. Our approach outperforms SBFL formulae such as Ochiai on our evaluation set as well as QuixBugs and requires neither a GPU nor any form of advanced program analysis. Existing SBFL solutions could possibly be improved with reasonable effort by adopting some of the proposed ideas.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2503.04301,
  title  = {Simple Fault Localization using Execution Traces},
  author = {Julian Aron Prenner and Romain Robbes},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.04301},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T22:09:00.646Z