Kernel-based Detection of Coincidentally Correct Test Cases to Improve Fault Localization Effectiveness

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel SVM-based approach with a custom kernel to identify coincidentally correct test cases, thereby enhancing spectrum-based fault localization accuracy.

Contribution

It proposes a new sequence-matching kernel for SVM to detect coincidental correctness, improving fault localization effectiveness.

Findings

Significant improvement in fault localization accuracy

Effective identification of coincidentally correct test cases

Enhanced performance of SBFL techniques

Abstract

Although empirical studies have confirmed the effectiveness of spectrum-based fault localization (SBFL) techniques, their performance may be degraded due to presence of some undesired circumstances such as the existence of coincidental correctness (CC) where one or more passing test cases exercise a faulty statement and thus causing some confusion to decide whether the underlying exercised statement is faulty or not. This article aims at improving SBFL effectiveness by mitigating the effect of CC test cases. In this regard, a new method is proposed that uses a support vector machine (SVM) with a customized kernel function. To build the kernel function, we applied a new sequence-matching algorithm that measures the similarities between passing and failing executions. We conducted some experiments to assess the proposed method. The results show that our method can effectively improve the performance of SBFL techniques.