Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Quality Software (QSIC '11),
IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, CA (2011)

On Practical Adequate Test Suites for
Integrated Test Case Prioritization and Fault Localization
1

Bo Jiang 2 , W.K. Chan 3 , and T.H. Tse 2

[paper from IEEE Xplore | paper from IEEE digital library | technical report TR-2011-10]

 ABSTRACT

An effective integration between testing and debugging should address how well testing and fault localization can work together productively. In this paper, we report an empirical study on the effectiveness of using adequate test suites for fault localization. We also investigate the integration of test case prioritization and statistical fault localization with a postmortem analysis approach. Our results on 16 test case prioritization techniques and four statistical fault localization techniques show that, although much advancement has been made in the last decade, test adequacy criteria are still insufficient in supporting effective fault localization. We also find that the use of branch-adequate test suites is more likely than statement-adequate test suites in the effective support of statistical fault localization.

Keywords: debugging, testing, continuous integration

1. This research is supported in part by the General Research Fund of the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong (project nos. 111410 and 717308) and a Strategic Research Grant of City University of Hong Kong (project no. 7008039).
2. Department of Computer Science, The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam, Hong Kong.
3. (Corresponding author.)
Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong, Tat Chee Avenue, Hong Kong.
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