Applying association analysis to dynamic slicing based fault localization

Abstract

Fault localization is a necessary process of locating faults in buggy programs. This paper proposes a novel approach using dynamic slicing and association analysis to improve the effectiveness of fault localization. Our approach utilizes dynamic slicing to generate a reduced candidate set to narrow the range of faults, and introduces association analysis to mine the relationship between the statements in the execution traces and the test results. In addition, we develop a prototype tool DSFL to implement our approach. Furthermore, we perform a set of empirical studies with 12 Java programs to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The experimental results show that our approach is more effective than the compared approaches. Copyright © 2014 The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers.