Simultaneous debugging of software faults

• Type: Article in International Scientific Journal
• Date: 2011

Authors

Rui Abreu (Author) FEUP; Peter Zoeteweij (Author) Other; Arjan J C van Gemund (Author) Other

Journal

Title: Journal of Systems and Software

Vol. 84 No. 4

Pages: 573-586

ISSN: 0164-1212

Publisher: Elsevier

Indexing

ISI Proceedings

ISI Web of Knowledge - 24 Citations

Scopus - 30 Citations

Scientific classification

FOS: Natural sciences > Computer and information sciences

Other information

Authenticus ID: P-002-T2M

DOI: 10.1016/j.jss.2010.11.915

Abstract (EN): (Semi-)automated diagnosis of software faults can drastically increase debugging efficiency, improving reliability and time-to-market. Current automatic diagnosis techniques are predominantly of a statistical nature and, despite typical defect densities, do not explicitly consider multiple faults, as also demonstrated by the popularity of the single-fault benchmark set of programs. We present a reasoning approach, called Zoltar-M(ultiple fault), that yields multiple-fault diagnoses, ranked in order of their probability. Although application of Zoltar-M to programs with many faults requires heuristics (trading-off completeness) to reduce the inherent computational complexity, theory as well as experiments on synthetic program models and multiple-fault program versions available from the software infrastructure repository (SIR) show that for multiple-fault programs this approach can outperform statistical techniques, notably spectrum-based fault localization (SFL). As a side-effect of this research, we present a new SFL variant, called Zoltar-S(ingle fault), that is optimal for single-fault programs, outperforming all other variants known to date.

Language: English

Type (Professor's evaluation): Scientific

No. of pages: 14