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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

Mutation analysis measures test suite adequacy, the degree to which a test suite detects seeded faults: one test suite is better than another if it detects more mutants. Mutation analysis effectiveness rests on the assumption that mutants…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2016-11-09 Miltiadis Allamanis , Earl T. Barr , René Just , Charles Sutton

Fault localization is one of the most time-consuming and error-prone parts of software debugging. There are several tools for helping developers in the fault localization process, however, they mostly target programs written in Java and…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-08-30 Qusay Idrees Sarhan , Attila Szatmari , Rajmond Toth , Arpad Beszedes

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 essential step during the debugging process. With the strong capabilities of code comprehension, the recent Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated promising performance in diagnosing bugs in the code.…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Yihao Qin , Shangwen Wang , Yiling Lou , Jinhao Dong , Kaixin Wang , Xiaoling Li , Xiaoguang Mao

Software fault localization remains challenging due to limited feature diversity and low precision in traditional methods. This paper proposes a novel approach that integrates multi-objective optimization with deep learning models to…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-11-27 Xiaolei Hu , Dongcheng Li , W. Eric Wong , Ya Zou

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…

We propose a new test case prioritization technique that combines both mutation-based and diversity-based approaches. Our diversity-aware mutation-based technique relies on the notion of mutant distinguishment, which aims to distinguish one…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2018-01-24 Donghwan Shin , Shin Yoo , Mike Papadakis , Doo-Hwan Bae

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…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2019-11-20 Son Nguyen

Novice programmers often face challenges in fault localization due to their limited experience and understanding of programming syntax and logic. Traditional methods like Spectrum-Based Fault Localization (SBFL) and Mutation-Based Fault…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-12-04 Hexiang Xu , Hengyuan Liu , Yonghao Wu , Xiaolan Kang , Xiang Chen , Yong Liu

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

Large language models (LLMs) have recently achieved significant success across various application domains, garnering substantial attention from different communities. Unfortunately, even for the best LLM, many \textit{faults} still exist…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-11-06 Qiang Hu , Jin Wen , Maxime Cordy , Yuheng Huang , Wei Ma , Xiaofei Xie , Lei Ma

Deep learning has revolutionized numerous fields, yet the reliability of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) remains a concern due to their complexity and data dependency. Traditional software fault localization methods, such as Spectrum-based…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-01-28 Soroush Hashemifar , Saeed Parsa , Akram Kalaee

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

Information Retrieval-based Fault Localization (IRFL) techniques aim to identify source files containing the root causes of reported failures. While existing techniques excel in ranking source files, challenges persist in bug report…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-12-06 Shuai Shao , Tingting Yu

Fault Localization (FL) is a critical step in Automated Program Repair (APR), and its importance has increased with the rise of Large Language Model (LLM)-based repair agents. In realistic project-level repair scenarios, software…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Melika Sepidband , Hamed Taherkhani , Hung Viet Pham , Hadi Hemmati

Although empirical studies have confirmed the effectiveness of spectrum-based fault localization (SBFL) techniques, their performance may be degraded due to presence of some undesired circumstances such as the existence of coincidental…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2018-07-06 Farid Feyzi , Saeed Parsa

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

Fault localization (FL) is a critical step in debugging, which typically relies on repeated executions to pinpoint faulty code regions. However, repeated executions can be impractical in the presence of non-deterministic failures or high…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Ahmadreza Saboor Yaraghi , Golnaz Gharachorlu , Sakina Fatima , Lionel C. Briand , Ruiyuan Wan , Ruifeng Gao

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