English
Related papers

Related papers: Ahead of Time Mutation Based Fault Localisation us…

200 papers

Fault localization (FL) analyzes the execution information of a test suite to pinpoint the root cause of a failure. The class imbalance of a test suite, i.e., the imbalanced class proportion between passing test cases (i.e., majority class)…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-03-14 Yan Lei , Tiantian Wen , Huan Xie , Lingfeng Fu , Chunyan Liu , Lei Xu , Hongxia Sun

Recent research demonstrated that mutation-based fault localization techniques are relatively accurate and practical. However, these methods have never been compared and have only been assessed with simple hand-seeded faults. Therefore,…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2016-07-20 Thierry Titcheu Chekam , Mike Papadakis , Yves Le Traon

Mutation analysis is a powerful technique for assessing test-suite adequacy, yet conventional approaches suffer from generating redundant, equivalent, or non-executable mutants. These challenges are particularly amplified in…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Pablo Valle , Shaukat Ali , Aitor Arrieta

Fault Localization (FL) is an important first step in software debugging and is mostly manual in the current practice. Many methods have been proposed over years to automate the FL process, including information retrieval (IR)-based…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-01-18 Nima Miryeganeh , Sepehr Hashtroudi , Hadi Hemmati

Software testing is essential for the reliable development of complex software systems. A key step in software testing is fault localization, which uses test data to pinpoint failure-inducing combinations for further diagnosis. Existing…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-03-30 Yi Ji , Simon Mak , Ryan Lekivetz , Joseph Morgan

In this paper, we propose DeepRL4FL, a deep learning fault localization (FL) approach that locates the buggy code at the statement and method levels by treating FL as an image pattern recognition problem. DeepRL4FL does so via novel code…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-03-02 Yi Li , Shaohua Wang , Tien N. Nguyen

Mutant selection refers to the problem of choosing, among a large number of mutants, the (few) ones that should be used by the testers. In view of this, we investigate the problem of selecting the fault revealing mutants, i.e., the mutants…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2018-11-06 Thierry Titcheu Chekam , Mike Papadakis , Tegawendé Bissyandé , Yves Le Traon , Koushik Sen

Identifying and resolving software faults remains a challenging and resource-intensive process. Traditional fault localization techniques, such as Spectrum-Based Fault Localization (SBFL), leverage statistical analysis of test coverage but…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-03-20 Md Nakhla Rafi , Dong Jae Kim , Tse-Hsun Chen , Shaowei Wang

Fault Localization (FL), in which a developer seeks to identify which part of the code is malfunctioning and needs to be fixed, is a recurring challenge in debugging. To reduce developer burden, many automated FL techniques have been…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-07-03 Sungmin Kang , Gabin An , Shin Yoo

Most studies focused on information retrieval-based techniques for fault localization, which built representations for bug reports and source code files and matched their semantic vectors through similarity measurement. However, such…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Chunying Zhou , Xiaoyuan Xie , Gong Chen , Peng He , Bing Li

Generative Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used in non-generative software maintenance tasks, such as fault localization (FL). Success in FL depends on a models ability to reason about program semantics beyond surface-level…

Spectrum-based fault localization (SBFL) works well for single-fault programs but its accuracy decays for increasing fault numbers. We present FLITSR (Fault Localization by Iterative Test Suite Reduction), a novel SBFL extension that…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-05-07 Dylan Callaghan , Bernd Fischer

Rapid adoptions of Deep Learning (DL) in a broad range of fields led to the development of specialised testing techniques for DL systems, including DL mutation testing. However, existing post-training DL mutation techniques often generate…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-01-23 Jinhan Kim , Nargiz Humbatova , Gunel Jahangirova , Shin Yoo , Paolo Tonella

Software fault prediction (SFP) is a critical task in software engineering, enabling early identification of faults in modules to improve software quality and reduce maintenance costs. This research investigates the combined effects of…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Ahmad Nauman Ghazi , Nagajyothi Devarapalli , Ashir Javeed , Sadi Alawadi , Fahed Alkhabbas , Khalid AlKharabsheh

Recently, Large Language Model (LLM)-based Fault Localization (FL) techniques have been proposed, and showed improved performance with explanations on FL results. However, a major issue with LLM-based FL techniques is their heavy reliance…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-12-03 Jindae Kim , Jaewoo Song

Fault Localization (FL) aims to automatically localize buggy lines of code, a key first step in many manual and automatic debugging tasks. Previous FL techniques assume the provision of input tests, and often require extensive program…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-10-04 Aidan Z. H. Yang , Ruben Martins , Claire Le Goues , Vincent J. Hellendoorn

Fuzzing is an important method to discover vulnerabilities in programs. Despite considerable progress in this area in the past years, measuring and comparing the effectiveness of fuzzers is still an open research question. In software…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-07-26 Philipp Görz , Björn Mathis , Keno Hassler , Emre Güler , Thorsten Holz , Andreas Zeller , Rahul Gopinath

Mutation analysis can provide valuable insights into both System Under Test (SUT) and its test suite. However, it is not scalable due to the cost of building and testing a large number of mutants. Predictive Mutation Testing (PMT) has been…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-09-15 Jinhan Kim , Juyoung Jeon , Shin Hong , Shin Yoo

As modern microservice systems grow increasingly popular and complex-often consisting of hundreds or even thousands of fine-grained, interdependent components-they are becoming more susceptible to frequent and subtle failures. Ensuring…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-01-19 Lingzhe Zhang , Yunpeng Zhai , Tong Jia , Chiming Duan , Siyu Yu , Jinyang Gao , Bolin Ding , Zhonghai Wu , Ying Li

Abrupt and unexpected terminations of software are termed as software crashes. They can be challenging to analyze. Finding the root cause requires extensive manual effort and expertise to connect information sources like stack traces,…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-02-12 Neetha Jambigi , Bartosz Bogacz , Moritz Mueller , Thomas Bach , Michael Felderer