Test Case Prioritization Approach to Improving the Effectiveness of Fault Localization

Abstract

Fault localization aims to use testing information from executed test cases to help locate the fault position. However, obtaining testing information (including test results and coverage information) is expensive because it needs much manual effort. How to orderly choose and execute a small number of test cases, and in the meantime achieve a good effectiveness of fault localization in the case of unknowing testing information is still a challenge for us. In this paper, we propose a new test case prioritization algorithm for fault localization, which is based on the rank changes of suspicious values of program elements. Test case which can maximize the improvements of suspicious ranks of program elements may assign the highest priority for execution. A set of empirical studies have been designed and conducted on Siemens programs and four medium-sized programs. The results show that our algorithm can help reduce the debugging effort in terms of the percentage of statements needed to be inspected to locate faults in both single-fault and multi-fault programs.