A literature review on different types of empirically evaluated bug localization approaches

TL;DR

This paper reviews various empirically evaluated bug localization techniques, focusing on those tested in industrial settings and including open source evaluations, to understand their effectiveness and categorization.

Contribution

It uniquely categorizes and analyzes bug localization methods evaluated in industry, filling a gap in existing literature.

Findings

Most techniques are evaluated on open source software

Limited number of methods tested in industrial environments

Categorization of bug localization approaches based on evaluation context

Abstract

Today, software systems have a significant role in various domains among which are healthcare, entertainment, transport and logistics, and many more. It is only natural that with this increasing dependency on software, the number of software systems increases. Additionally, these systems become more and more complex. All this leads to a rise in the number of software faults also known as bugs. As a result, the ability to locate the source of a bug (e.g. a file or a commit) is vital for the development and maintenance of efficient software solutions. Bug localization refers to the automated process of discovering files that contain bugs, based on a bug report. This research project aims to make a literature review on different techniques for bug localization. This study distinguishes itself from other surveys and literature reviews [1] in one significant way. The focus of the work is on identifying, categorizing and analyzing existing bug localization methods and tools which were evaluated in an industrial setting. To the best of my knowledge, there are no other works that prioritise this aspect. Unfortunately, such literature is scarce, therefore, bug localization techniques evaluated on open source software are also included.