Call Frequency-Based Fault Localization

Spectrum-Based Fault Localization (SBFL), in its basic form, uses only local information about a program element’s (such as a method’s) coverage to predict its faultiness, and rarely is any additional (contextual) information leveraged about the element itself, nor the test cases. As such an additional context, in the presented approach, we rely on the frequency of the investigated method occurring in call stack instances during the course of executing the failing test cases. The basic intuition is that if a method is called in many different contexts during a failing test case, it will be more probable to be accountable for the fault compared to other methods. We empirically evaluated the fault localization capability of the approach compared to five traditional SBFL techniques using the bug benchmark Defects4J. We found that the new algorithms (i) find the location of bugs at higher rank positions more often, (ii) can achieve 38%–52% rank position improvement compared to the baseline algorithms with statistical significance, and (iii) place more items at the top-10 positions of the suspiciousness ranking.

Keywords: Spectrum-Based Fault Localization, Method Call Frequency, Call Stacks, Testing, Debugging.