Computer Science ›› 2017, Vol. 44 ›› Issue (11): 175-180.doi: 10.11896/j.issn.1002-137X.2017.11.026

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MBFL with Statement-oriented Mutant Reduction Strategy

WANG Lin-xin, WANG Wei-wei, ZHAO Rui-lian and LI Zheng   

  • Online:2018-12-01 Published:2018-12-01

Abstract: How to efficiently and accurately locate faults in programs during the process of software debugging is taken up as a matter of common concern for software developers.MBFL is a fault localization technique based on mutation analysis,which precisely identifies the root cause of fault but incurs a high execution cost,since it needs to execute the test suite on a large amount of mutants.For decreasing the execution cost of MBFL,this paper presented a statement-oriented mutant reduction strategy,which selects a certain proportion set of mutants generated by statements covered by failed tests,according to the previous execution information of test suite.Empirical studies were conducted on 112 faulty versions from 7 program packages.The results indicate that this strategy can reduce 73.51%~79.98% mutation execution cost under the case of keeping high fault location precision.

Key words: Fault localization,Mutation analysis,Mutant reduction strategy

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