Harnessing Test Call Structures for Improved Fault Localization Effectiveness

Identifying the cause of a software bug is a difficult and costly task that requires a detailed understanding of codebase structures. We argue that a smaller target space can reduce the developer's investigation effort, thus it should be utilized in fault localization. In this paper, we propose a new spectrum-based fault location (SBFL) approach based on the test call-structure information, called Test Call-Structure-Based (TCS) fault location. We evaluate the effectiveness of our approach using the Barinel formula on the Defects4J bug benchmark. The results show that our approach can achieve an average rank improvement in 75% of the projects in Defects4J. Furthermore, our approach can place more buggy methods among the Top-10 most suspicious elements. Moreover, our approach identifies more bugs that were previously unlikely to be found using the hit-based SBFL method.