Proteum/FL: A tool for localizing faults using mutation analysis

Abstract

Fault diagnosis is the process of analyzing programs with the aim of identifying the code fragments that are faulty. It has been identified as one of the most expensive and time consuming tasks of software development. Even worst, this activity is usually accomplished based on manual analysis. To this end, automatic or semi-automatic fault diagnosis approaches are useful in assisting software developers. Hence, they can play an essential role in decreasing the overall development cost. This paper presents Proteum/FL, a mutation analysis tool for diagnosing previously detected faults. Given an ANSI-C program and a set of test cases, Proteum/FL returns a list of program statements ranked according to their likelihood of being faulty. The tool differs from the rest of the mutation analysis and fault diagnosis tools by employing mutation analysis as a means of diagnosing program faults. It therefore demonstrates the effective use of mutation in supporting both testing and debugging activities.