FTMES: A Failed-Test-Oriented Mutant Execution Strategy for Mutation-Based Fault Localization

Abstract

Fault localization has been one of the most manual and costly software debugging activities. The spectrum-based fault localization is the most studied and evaluated fault localization approach. Mutation-based fault localization is a promising approach but with a high computational cost. We propose a novel mutation execution strategy named Failed-Test Oriented Mutant Execution Strategy (FTMES) for improving the efficacy of fault localization techniques and also reduce the computational cost of these techniques. Our proposed approach and eight other baselines were evaluated against 221 real faults. The results show that FTMES outperformed others with respect to efficiency (computational cost) while maintaining similar accuracy.