A Community-Based Fault Isolation Approach for Effective Simultaneous Localization of Faults

During program testing, software programs may be discovered to contain multiple faults. Multiple faults in a program may reduce the effectiveness of the existing fault localization techniques due to the complex relationship between faults and failures in the presence of multiple faults. In an ideal...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE access 2019, Vol.7, p.50012-50030
Main Authors: Zakari, Abubakar, Lee, Sai Peck, Targio Hashem, Ibrahim Abaker
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Algorithms
Clustering
Clustering algorithms
Complex network
Debugging
Distance measurement
Fault detection
Fault diagnosis
fault isolation
fault localization
Fault location
Localization
multiple faults
parallel debugging
program debugging
Software
Software algorithms
Task analysis
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Summary:During program testing, software programs may be discovered to contain multiple faults. Multiple faults in a program may reduce the effectiveness of the existing fault localization techniques due to the complex relationship between faults and failures in the presence of multiple faults. In an ideal case, faults are isolated into fault-focused clusters, each targeting a single fault for developers to localize them simultaneously in parallel. However, the relationship between faults and failures is not easily identified and depends solely on the accuracy of clustering, as such existing clustering algorithms are not able to isolate failed tests to their causative faults effectively which hinder localization effectiveness. This paper proposes a new approach that makes use of a divisive network community clustering algorithm to isolate faults into separate fault-focused communities that target a single fault each. A community weighting and selection mechanism that aids in prioritizing highly important fault-focused communities to the available developers to debug the faults simultaneously in parallel is also proposed. The approach is evaluated on eight subject programs ranging from medium-sized to large-sized programs (tcas, replace, gzip, sed, flex, grep, make, and ant). Overall, 540 multiple-fault versions of these programs were generated with 2-5 faulty versions. The experimental results have demonstrated that the proposed approach performs significantly better in terms of localization effectiveness in comparison with two other parallel debugging approaches for locating multiple faults in parallel.
ISSN:2169-3536
2169-3536
DOI:10.1109/ACCESS.2019.2910327