Abstract
AbstractDebugging is one of the most time-consuming and expensive tasks in software development. Several formula-based fault localization (FBFL) methods have been proposed, but they fail to guarantee a set of diagnoses across all failing tests or may produce redundant diagnoses that are not subset-minimal, particularly for programs with multiple faults.This paper introduces a novel fault localization approach for C programs with multiple faults. CFaults leverages Model-Based Diagnosis (MBD) with multiple observations and aggregates all failing test cases into a unified MaxSAT formula. Consequently, our method guarantees consistency across observations and simplifies the fault localization procedure. Experimental results on two benchmark sets of C programs, TCAS and C-Pack-IPAs, show that CFaults is faster than other FBFL approaches like BugAssist and SNIPER. Moreover, CFaults only generates subset-minimal diagnoses of faulty statements, whereas the other approaches tend to enumerate redundant diagnoses.
Publisher
Springer Nature Switzerland
Reference43 articles.
1. Abreu, R., Zoeteweij, P., van Gemund, A.J.C.: Spectrum-based multiple fault localization. In: ASE 2009, 24th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, Auckland, New Zealand, November 16-20 2009, pp. 88–99. IEEE Computer Society (2009). https://doi.org/10.1109/ASE.2009.25
2. Abreu, R., Zoeteweij, P., Golsteijn, R., van Gemund, A.J.C.: A practical evaluation of spectrum-based fault localization. J. Syst. Softw. 82(11), 1780–1792 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1016/J.JSS.2009.06.035
3. Biere, A., Heule, M., van Maaren, H., Walsh, T. (eds.): Handbook of Satisfiability, Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications, vol. 185. IOS Press (2009)
4. Clarke, E.M., Grumberg, O., Kroening, D., Peled, D.A., Veith, H.: Model checking, 2nd Edition. MIT Press (2018). https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/model-checking-second-edition
5. Lecture Notes in Computer Science;E Clarke,2004