Spectral Debugging with Weights and Incremental Ranking

Lee Naish
Hua Jie Lee
Kotagiri Ramamohanarao


Software faults can be diagnosed using program spectra. The program spectra considered here provide information about which statements are executed in each one of a set of test cases. This information is used to compute a value for each statement which indicates how likely it is to be buggy, and the statements are ranked according to these values. We present two improvements to this method. First, we associate varying weights with failed test cases --- test cases which execute fewer statements are given more weight and have more influence on the ranking. This generally improves diagnosis accuracy, with little additional cost. Second, the ranking is computed incrementally. After the top-ranked statement is identified, the weights are adjusted in order to compute the rest of the ranking. This further improves accuracy. The cost is more significant, but not prohibitive.

Note: the version here is an updated version of what appeared in the conference proceedings. The results in the conference version are incorrect. This was primarily caused by incorrect intrumentation in the benchmarks (in some Unix programs the wrong line was listed as being buggy). Second, there was some rounding in calculating rank percentages when there were ties (some other researchers perform this rounding also; in this version no additional rounding was done other than that always done in IEEE double precision floating point calculations). Finally, a smaller epsilon value was used compared with what is stated in the paper.

Keywords: software fault diagnosis; spectral debugging; weights; incremental ranking


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