CharmFL: A Fault Localization Tool for Python

TL;DR

CharmFL is a Python fault localization tool integrated with PyCharm that uses spectrum-based analysis to help developers efficiently identify faulty code segments, addressing a gap in existing tools for Python.

Contribution

We introduce CharmFL, a novel fault localization tool for Python that supports hierarchical coverage analysis and integrates seamlessly with PyCharm IDE.

Findings

Effective in identifying various fault types in Python programs

Supports hierarchical coverage analysis for detailed fault localization

Helps developers reduce debugging time

Abstract

Fault localization is one of the most time-consuming and error-prone parts of software debugging. There are several tools for helping developers in the fault localization process, however, they mostly target programs written in Java and C/C++ programming languages. While these tools are splendid on their own, we must not look over the fact that Python is a popular programming language, and still there are a lack of easy-to-use and handy fault localization tools for Python developers. In this paper, we present a tool called "CharmFL" for software fault localization as a plug-in for PyCharm IDE. The tool employs Spectrum-based fault localization (SBFL) to help Python developers automatically analyze their programs and generate useful data at run-time to be used, then to produce a ranked list of potentially faulty program elements (i.e., statements, functions, and classes). Thus, our proposed tool supports different code coverage types with the possibility to investigate these types in a hierarchical approach. The applicability of our tool has been presented by using a set of experimental use cases. The results show that our tool could help developers to efficiently find the locations of different types of faults in their programs.