A Comparison Study of Two Well-known Fault Localization Methods

The performance of the fault localization techniques plays a significant role in their practical adoption. This paper reports an empirical study of two states of the art fault localization techniques. The main differences from previous studies are: (1) the specialized focus on two methods to present effective advice, (2) considering different suspiciousness formulae to limit their effect on the fault localization accuracy, and (3) two different test suites containing small and large scale projects to test all aspects of the methods. Important factors of each fault localization methods have defined the accuracy and execution time. Our results provide proper information about spectrum-based and mutation-based fault localization to help other scholars to choose the best method based on their requirements. The empirical results indicate that the mutation- based fault localization is relatively 12 percent slower and 5.2 percent more accurate than the spectrum-based fault localization.