Abstract
An important research direction of spectrum-based fault localization (SBFL) is the effectiveness of risk evaluation formulas. In the past two decades, many relevant studies have adopted an empirical approach, which can hardly be considered as sufficiently comprehensive because of the huge number of combinations of various factors in SBFL. Though some studies aimed at overcoming the limitations of the empirical approach, none of them has provided a completely satisfactory solution. Therefore, in this chapter, we introduce a theoretical framework proposed by us (Xie et al (2013) ACM Trans Softw Eng Methodol 22(4):31:1–31:40), which can compare and analyze the effectiveness of any given risk evaluation formulas, without conducting any experiments. This framework is built on a concept of set division of all program statements, and this division is defined by the given formula. In Sect. 2.3 we show the proof of the set division for 30 commonly adopted formulas, which will be used in the following chapters.
Part of this chapter Ⓒ2013 ACM. Reprinted, with permission from ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology; October 2013. Vol. 22, No. 4, Article 31, 1–40. https://doi.org/10.1145/2522920.2522924 (Ref. [8]).
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Xie, X., Xu, B. (2021). A Theoretical Framework for Spectrum-Based Fault Localization. In: Essential Spectrum-based Fault Localization. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-6179-9_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-6179-9_2
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