Poster: A Qualitative Reasoning Approach to Spectrum-Based Fault Localization

As spectrum-based fault localization (SFL) reasons about coverage rather than source code, it allows for a lightweight, language agnostic way of pinpointing faults in software. However, SFL misses certain faults, such as errors of omission, and may fail to provide enough contextual information about its diagnoses. We propose Q-SFL, that leverages the concept of qualitative reasoning to augment the information made available to SFL techniques, by qualitatively partitioning the values of data units from the system, and treating each qualitative state as a new SFL component to be used when diagnosing.