Int J Performability Eng ›› 2019, Vol. 15 ›› Issue (7): 1988-1997.doi: 10.23940/ijpe.19.07.p26.19881997

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Normalization of Notation NCF for Improving Fault Localization

Zhao Lia, Yi Songa, Siwei Zhoub,c, Dongcheng Lic, and Peng Chena,*   

  1. a College of Computer and Information Technology, China Three Gorges University, Yichang, 443002, China
    b School of Computer Science and Technology, Wuhan University of Technology, Wuhan, 430070, China
    c Department of Computer Science, University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, 75080, USA
  • Submitted on ;
  • Contact: * E-mail address: chenpeng@ctgu.edu.cn
  • Supported by:
    This work was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (No. 2016YFC0802500, 2016YFB0800403), the Hubei Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 2018CFC852), and the Research Fund for Excellent Dissertation of China Three Gorges University (No. 2019SSPY072).

Abstract: In view of the importance and the high cost of effective software fault localization, how to improve the effectiveness of the software fault localization has become an important and persistent issue in software engineering. Featuring simple operation and high popularity, the spectrum-based fault localization technique obtains program spectrum information by executing test cases on the program and then calculates the suspiciousness of each statement, which provides a basis for the programmers to debug. This paper proposed CFNorm, a new fault localization parameter, which can be obtained by processing the column data of the spectrum information matrix. CFNorm emphasizes and amplifies the role of NCF (the number of times a statement is executed by failed test cases) to optimize the traditional fault localization technique for better fault localization. Three fault localization techniques were selected to be used in an experiment involving 111 versions of Siemens Suite. The results showed that the effectiveness of fault localization was significantly improved with the increase in the weight of CFNorm over a certain range.

Key words: CFNorm, software fault localization, testing, debugging, suspiciousness, normalization