Title: Kernel-based detection of coincidentally correct test cases to improve fault localisation effectiveness

Authors: Farid Feyzi; Saeed Parsa

Addresses: School of Computer Engineering, Iran University of Science and Technology, Tehran, Iran ' School of Computer Engineering, Iran University of Science and Technology, Tehran, Iran

Abstract: Although empirical studies have confirmed the effectiveness of spectrum-based fault localisation (SBFL) techniques, their performance may be degraded due to presence of some undesired circumstances such as the existence of coincidental correctness (CC) where one or more passing test cases exercise a faulty statement and thus causing some confusion to decide whether the underlying exercised statement is faulty or not. This article aims at improving SBFL effectiveness by mitigating the effect of CC test cases. In this regard, a new method is proposed that uses a support vector machine (SVM) with a customised kernel function. To build the kernel function, we applied a new sequence-matching algorithm that measures the similarities between passing and failing executions. We conducted some experiments to assess the proposed method. The results show that our method can effectively improve the performance of SBFL techniques.

Keywords: coincidental correctness; support vector machine; SVM; spectrum-based faults localisation; SBFL; kernel function.

DOI: 10.1504/IJAPR.2018.092520

International Journal of Applied Pattern Recognition, 2018 Vol.5 No.2, pp.119 - 136

Received: 08 Sep 2017
Accepted: 07 Mar 2018
Published online: 23 Jun 2018 *

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