Debugging in Parallel or Sequential: An Empirical Study

Faults need to be identified, localized, and removed from programs. Empirical studies show that coverage-based faults localizations effectively target bugs, even in the presence of multiple faults. Debugging is a time-consuming activity and it is beneficial to accelerate the process by employing app...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of software 2015-05, Vol.10 (5), p.566-576
Main Authors: Pang, Yulei, Xue, Xiaozhen, Siami Namin, Akbar
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Computer programs
Debugging
Empirical analysis
Faults
Java (programming language)
Localization
Position (location)
Strategy
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Summary:Faults need to be identified, localized, and removed from programs. Empirical studies show that coverage-based faults localizations effectively target bugs, even in the presence of multiple faults. Debugging is a time-consuming activity and it is beneficial to accelerate the process by employing appropriate techniques. The need for speeding up the debugging process is even more immense when the program under test contains multiple faults. A program with multiple faults can be debugged in parallel where each sub-process specifically targets localizing one of the bugs. This paper investigates and compares the performance of parallel and sequential debugging in effectively localizing faults where the performance is measured according to fault localization cost required by each strategy. Based on the experimental study of several open source Java programs conducted in this paper, the authors observe that debugging when is performed in parallel outperforms sequential strategy in terms of the total cost.
ISSN:1796-217X
1796-217X
DOI:10.17706/jsw.10.5.566-576