Cost-effective testing based fault localization with distance based test-suite reduction

The aim of testing based fault localization (TBFL) involves improving the efficiency of program debugging by providing developers with a guide of ranked list of suspicious statements. However, collection of testing information of the whole original test-suite is excessively expensive or even infeasible for developers to conduct TBFL. Traditional test-suite reduction (TSR) techniques are utilized to reduce the size of test-suite. However, they entail a time-consuming process of whole testing information collection. In this study, the distance based test-suite reduction (DTSR) technique is proposed. As opposed to the whole testing information, the distances among the test cases are used to guide the process of test-suite reduction in DTSR. Hence, it is only necessary to collect the testing information for a portion of the test cases for TSR and TBFL. The investigation on the Siemens and SIR benchmarks reveals that DTSR can effectively reduce the size of the given test-suite as well as the time cost of TBFL. Additionally, the fault locating effectiveness of DTSR results is close to that when the whole test-suite is used.