Do Bug-Fix Types Affect Spectrum-Based Fault Localization Algorithms’ Efficiency?

Finding a bug in the software is an expensive task, however, debugging is a crucial part of the software development life cycle. Spectrum-Based Fault Localization (SBFL) algorithms can reduce the time spent with debugging. Despite the fact that SBFL is a very well researched topic, there are not many tools that implement it. Many studies have dealt with the effectiveness of SBFL algorithms, although these have been evaluated on Java and C++ programming languages. We performed an empirical study on JavaScript programs (using BugsJS benchmark) to evaluate the relationship between algorithms efficiency and the bug-fix types. First we implemented three popular SBFL approaches, i.e. Tarantula, Ochiai and DStar, then examined whether there was a correlation/connection between the positions of the faulty methods in the suspiciousness ranks and bug-fix types. Results show that certain bug-fix types can be significantly differentiated from the others (in both positive and negative direction) based on the fault localization effectiveness of the investigated algorithms.

Keywords: Spectrum-Based Fault Localization, JavaScript,bug classification, testing and debugging.