Demystifying the Combination of Dynamic Slicing and
Spectrum-based Fault Localization
Abstract
Several approaches have been proposed to reduce
debugging costs through automated software fault
diagnosis. Dynamic Slicing (DS) and Spectrumbased Fault Localization (SFL) are popular fault
diagnosis techniques and normally seen as complementary. This paper reports on a comprehensive
study to reassess the effects of combining DS with
SFL. With this combination, components that are often involved in failing but seldom in passing test runs
could be located and their suspiciousness reduced.
Results show that the DS-SFL combination, coined
as Tandem-FL, improves the diagnostic accuracy up
to 73.7% (13.4% on average). Furthermore, results
indicate that the risk of missing faulty statements,
which is a DS’s key limitation, is not high — DS
misses faulty statements in 9% of the 260 cases. To
sum up, we found that the DS-SFL combination
was practical and effective and encourage new SFL
techniques to be evaluated against that optimization