Configuration-dependent Fault Localization

TL;DR

This paper introduces CoFL, a new method for efficiently localizing configuration-dependent bugs in configurable systems by analyzing suspicious feature interactions, significantly improving fault localization accuracy and reducing search space.

Contribution

CoFL is the first approach to specifically address configuration-dependent fault localization by analyzing feature interactions, outperforming existing spectrum-based methods.

Findings

Correctness in ranking buggy statements increased over 7 times.

Search space reduced by about 15 times.

Significant improvement over baseline spectrum-based approaches.

Abstract

In a buggy configurable system, configuration-dependent bugs cause the failures in only certain configurations due to unexpected interactions among features. Manually localizing configuration-dependent faults in configurable systems could be highly time-consuming due to their complexity. However, the cause of configuration-dependent bugs is not considered by existing automated fault localization techniques, which are designed to localize bugs in non-configurable code. Thus, their capacity for efficient configuration-dependent localization is limited. In this work, we propose CoFL, a novel approach to localize configuration-dependent bugs by identifying and analyzing suspicious feature interactions that potentially cause the failures in buggy configurable systems. We evaluated the efficiency of CoFL in fault localization of artificial configuration-dependent faults in a highly-configurable system. We found that CoFL significantly improves the baseline spectrum-based approaches. With CoFL, on average, the correctness in ranking the buggy statements increases more than 7 times, and the search space is significantly narrowed down, about 15 times.