Distance-based Test-Suite Reduction for Efficient Testing-based Fault Localization

Testing-based Fault Localization (TBFL) can guide and automate the process of program debugging by providing developers with a ranked list of suspicious statements. However, collecting the testing information of the whole original test-suite is always too expensive or even infeasible for developers to conduct efficient TBFL. Traditional Test-Suite Reduction (TSR) approaches can be utilized to reduce the size of test-suite. But they still rely on the time-consuming process of the whole testing information collection. In this paper, we propose a distance-based test-suite reduction (DTSR) approach. It is guided by the distances between the test cases rather than the whole testing information when conducting the test-suite reduction. Compared with the existing TSRs, DTSR only needs to collect the testing information of a part of test cases. Our investigation on a series of benchmarks shows that DTSR can effectively reduce the size of the given test-suite and the time cost of TBFL. Nerveless, the fault localization effective-ness of our approach is close to that of the whole test-suite.