iFL for Eclipse - A Tool to Support Interactive Fault Localization in Eclipse IDE

We present a tool to aid Spectrum-Based Fault Localization (SBFL). A possibility to increase the practical usefulness of SBFL tools is to involve interactivity. In our approach, called iFL, we involve the user's previous knowledge about the system: the developer interacts with the fault localization algorithm by giving feedback on the elements of the prioritized list. iFL for Eclipse supports iFL for Java projects developed in this environment. The plug-in reads the tree of project elements (classes and methods) and lists them in a table with detailed information. This includes the suspiciousness scores calculated using a traditional SBFL formula such as Tarantula. Interactivity between the tool and the programmer is achieved by providing the possibility to send feedback to the FL engine about the table elements and their context. The user can choose from the following options: (1) the item is faulty (the process stops), (2) it is not faulty nor its context (they are moved lower in the rank), or (3) it is not faulty but the context is suspicious (they are ranked higher). During the live demonstration, we will give a walkthrough of all features of the tool.

Keywords: Spectrum-Based Fault Localization (SBFL), Interactive debugging, Eclipse plug-in.