Evaluation of Tools to the Fault Localization
Fabio Pereira da Silva · 2022
Despite the research effort in debugging activity this task is still carried out in the same way since the 60s, when the first symbolic debuggers were introduced and is responsible for a large part of costs in a software project by organizations. A promising approach, called Spectrum-based Fault Localization(SFL), consists of techniques that provide a list of suspicious programelements (eg., statements, blocks, methods and packages)more likely to be faulty. In this study, we compare two SFL toolsthat utilize different metaphors. Jaguar uses a textual metaphor while Code Forest a three-dimensional metaphor. The results ofan evaluation with 119 students using both tools are presented in this article. They were assessed regarding to the effectiveness and efficiency during fault localization. The effectiveness and efficiency were assessed, respectively, by the tool's ability to direct the developer to the faulty method or line and the time spent to locate them. The results show that Jaguar is more effective and efficient than Code Forest; however, the statistical effect size measure is insignificant.