Effective fault localization using probabilistic and grouping approach

Fault localization (FL) is the key activity while debugging a program. Any improvement to this activity leads to significant improvement in total software development cost. In the paper, we present a conditional probability statistics based fault localization technique that derives the association between statement coverage information and test case execution result. This association with the failed test case result shows the fault containing probability of that specific statement. Subsequently, we use a grouping method to refine the obtained statement ranking sequence for better fault localization. We named our proposed FL technique as CGFL, it is an abbreviation of Conditional probability and Grouping based Fault Localization. We evaluated the effectiveness of the proposed method over eleven open-source data sets from Defects4j and SIR repositories. Our obtained results show that on average, the proposed CGFL method is 24.56% more effective than contemporary FL techniques namely D\(^*\), Tarantula, Ochiai, Crosstab, BPNN, RBFNN, DNN, and CNN.