Improving Mutation-Based Fault Localization for Better Locating Omission Faults Using Coverage Change Information

Juyoung Jeon, Shin Hong

http://doi.org/10.5626/JOK.2020.47.9.863

Although omission faults are bugs commonly found in real-world programs, existing mutation-based fault localization techniques show low accuracy at locating omission faults because useful mutants are not likely generated at locations where necessary statements are missed. This paper introduces two new techniques, MUSEUM+ and Metallaxis+, an extension of two mutationbased fault localization techniques, MUSEUM and Metallaxis, by adding elements that link the change of coverage information and the change of test results. The proposed MBFL techniques additionally utilize coverage change information to consider the characteristics of omission faults. The experiment with the 16 JFreeChart faults in Defects4J, including 10 omission faults and 6 non-omission faults demonstrate that the presented techniques, MUSEUM+ and Metallaxis+, show improved faults localization accuracy.