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Combining Dynamic Slicing and Spectrum-Based Fault Localization - A First Experimental Evaluation

Authors Jonas Schleich, Franz Wotawa

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OASIcs.DX.2025.3.pdf
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Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Software and its engineering → Software testing and debugging
  • Computing methodologies → Causal reasoning and diagnostics
Keywords
  • Software fault localization
  • program slicing
  • spectrum-based fault localization
  • automated debugging

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Abstract

Identifying and localizing bugs in programs has always been considered a complex but essential topic. Whereas the former has led to substantial progress in areas like formal verification and testing with a high degree of automation, the latter has not been satisfactorily automated. Approaches like program slicing, model-based diagnosis, and, more recently, spectrum-based fault localization can be used to find possible causes of a misbehaving program automatically, but often come with high computational complexity or a larger list of diagnoses, which require additional manual effort. In this paper, we present the first experimental results of an approach that combines program slicing with spectrum-based fault localization aiming at improving the outcome of automated debugging methods. In contrast to previous work, where we illustrated potential improvements only by considering a particular use case, we present an evaluation based on 22 different example programs in this paper. The approach improves the wasted effort on average by around 5 to 15% on average.

Cite As Get BibTex

Jonas Schleich and Franz Wotawa. Combining Dynamic Slicing and Spectrum-Based Fault Localization - A First Experimental Evaluation. In 36th International Conference on Principles of Diagnosis and Resilient Systems (DX 2025). Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs), Volume 136, pp. 3:1-3:18, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025) https://doi.org/10.4230/OASIcs.DX.2025.3

Author Details

Jonas Schleich
  • Graz University of Technology, Austria
Franz Wotawa
  • Institute of Software Engineering and Artificial Intelligence, Graz University of Technology, Austria

Funding

  • Wotawa, Franz: The work was supported by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) Cluster of Excellence Bilateral AI under contract number 10.55776/COE12.

Supplementary Materials

References

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