Investigating Fault Localization Techniques from Other Disciplines for Software Engineering

In many different engineering fields, fault localization means narrowing down the cause of a failure to a small number of suspicious components of the system. This activity is an important concern in many areas, and there have been a large number of techniques proposed to aid this activity. Some of the basic ideas used are common to different fields, but generally quite diverse approaches are applied. Our long-term goal with the presented research is to identify potential techniques from non-software domains that have not yet been fully leveraged to software faults, and investigate their applicability and adaptation to our field. We performed an analysis of related literature, not limiting the search to any specific engineering field, with the aim to find solutions in non-software areas that could be most successfully adapted to software fault localization. We found out that few areas have significant literature in the topic that are good candidates for adaptation (computer networks, for instance), and that although some classes of methods are less suitable, there are useful ideas in almost all fields that could potentially be reused. As an example of potential novel techniques for software fault localization, we present three concrete techniques from other fields and how they could potentially be adapted.

Keywords: Faults, Defects, Fault Localization, Software Fault Localization, Literature Review, Interdisciplinary Aspects