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
Lee