An Empirical Study of Fault Localization Families and Their Combinations

03/27/2018

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by   Daming Zou, et al.

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The performance of fault localization techniques is critical to their adoption in practice. This paper reports on an empirical study of a wide range of fault localization techniques on real-world faults. Different from previous studies, this paper (1) considers a wide range of techniques from different families, and (2) combines different techniques. Our results reveal that combined technique significantly outperforms any individual technique (175 increase in defects localized in Top 1), suggesting that combination may be a desirable way to apply fault localization techniques and future techniques should also be evaluated in the combined setting. Our implementation is publicly available for evaluating and combining fault localization techniques.