Fine-tuning spectrum based fault localisation with frequent method item sets

Continuous integration is a best practice adopted in modern software development teams to identify potential faults immediately upon project build. Once a fault is detected it must be repaired immediately, hence continuous integration provides an ideal testbed for experimenting with the state of the art in fault localisation. In this paper we propose a variant of what is known as spectrum based fault localisation, which leverages patterns of method calls by means of frequent itemset mining. We compare our variant (we refer to it as patterned spectrum analysis) against the state of the art and demonstrate on 351 real faults drawn from five representative open source java projects that patterned spectrum analysis is more effective in localising the fault.