The improved dynamic slicing for spectrum-based fault localization.

Background: Spectrum-based Fault localization have proven to be useful in the process of software testing and debugging. However, how to improve the effectiveness of software fault localization has always been a research hot spot in the field of software engineering. Dynamic slicing can extract program dependencies under certain conditions. Thus, this technology is expected to benefit for locating fault.

Methods: We propose an improved dynamic slicing for spectrum-based fault localization under a general framework. We first obtain the dynamic slice of program execution. Secondly, we construct a mixed slice spectrum matrix from the dynamic slice of each test case and the corresponding test results. Finally, we compute the suspiciousness value of each statement in the mixed-slice spectram matrix.

Results: To verify the performance of our method, we conduct an empirical study on 15 widely used open-source programs. Experimental results show that our approach achieves significant improvement than the compared techniques.

Conclusions: Our approach can reduce approximately 1% to 17.79% of the average cost of code examined significantly.