Precise Propagation of Fault-Failure Correlations in Program Flow Graphs

Abstract—Statistical fault localization techniques find suspicious faulty program entities in programs by comparing passed and failed executions. Existing studies show that such techniques can be promising in locating program faults. However, coincidental correctness and execution crashes may make program entities indistinguishable in the execution spectra under study, or cause inaccurate counting, thus severely affecting the precision of existing fault localization techniques. In this paper, we propose a BlockRank technique, which calculates, contrasts, and propagates the mean edge profiles between passed and failed executions to alleviate the impact of coincidental correctness. To address the issue of execution crashes, BlockRank identifies suspicious basic blocks by modeling how each basic block contributes to failures by apportioning their fault relevance to surrounding basic blocks in terms of the rate of successful transition observed from passed and failed executions. BlockRan...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: COMPSAC
• Authors: Zhenyu Zhang, W. K. Chan, T. H. Tse, Bo Jiang
• Keywords: COMPSAC 2011, Edge Profiles, Fault Localization, Localization Techniques, Software Engineering