Contribution-based Test Case Reduction Strategy for Mutation-based Fault Localization (S)
Haifeng Wang, Kun Yang, Xiangnan Zhao, Yuchen Cui, Weiwei Wang · Proceedings/Proceedings of the ... International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering · 2023
Fault localization is one of the most expensive steps during software debugging.Mutation-based Fault Localization (MBFL) is a promising technique but with a high computational cost since the large mutation execution on mutation analysis.Previous studies mainly reduce the cost of decreasing the number of mutants and optimizing the process execution, such kinds of strategies have shown promising results.However, reducing the cost of MBFL by decreasing the number of test cases is also effective.In this paper, we propose a Contribution-Based Test Case Reduction (CBTCR) strategy for improving the efficiency of MBFL.CBTCR first measures the contribution value of each test case and then selects the test cases according to the value.Then it takes the reduced test suite for executing the mutants.We evaluate CBTCR on 383 real software faults from the Defects4J benchmark.The results show that CBTCR outperforms the other MBFL test case reduction strategies (e.g., FTMES, IETCR) in terms of the Top-N and MAP metrics.Also, CBTCR can significantly reduce 85.43% of the cost on average while maintaining a similar accuracy to original MBFL techniques.