Are faults localizable?

Abstract

Many fault localization techniques have been proposed to facilitate debugging activities. Most of them attempt to pinpoint the location of faults (i.e., localize faults) based on a set of failing and correct executions and expect debuggers to investigate a certain number of located program elements to find faults. These techniques thus assume that faults are localizable, i.e., only one or a few lines of code that are close to one another are responsible for each fault. However, in reality, are faults localizable? In this work, we investigate hundreds of real faults in several software systems, and find that many faults may not be localizable to a few lines of code and these include faults with high severity level.