# An Empirical Study of Fault Localization Families and Their Combinations

## TL;DR

This empirical study evaluates various fault localization techniques, demonstrating that combining multiple methods significantly improves fault localization effectiveness and highlighting the importance of considering execution time.

## Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive empirical analysis of diverse fault localization techniques, including their combination and execution time, providing new insights into their performance in real-world scenarios.

## Key findings

- Combined techniques outperform individual ones by 200% in Top 1 faults localized
- Considering execution time influences the choice of fault localization methods
- Future research should evaluate techniques in combined settings

## Abstract

The performance of fault localization techniques is critical to their adoption in practice. This paper reports on an empirical study of a wide range of fault localization techniques on real-world faults. Different from previous studies, this paper (1) considers a wide range of techniques from different families, (2) combines different techniques, and (3) considers the execution time of different techniques. Our results reveal that a combined technique significantly outperforms any individual technique (200% increase in faults localized in Top 1), suggesting that combination may be a desirable way to apply fault localization techniques and that future techniques should also be evaluated in the combined setting. Our implementation is publicly available for evaluating and combining fault localization techniques.