Fault localization with intersection of control-flow based execution traces

Because debugging is notoriously time-consuming and laborious, fault localization becomes a major activity in software testing researches. This paper proposes a novel fault localization approach which utilizes intersection of control-flow based execution traces. It reports all program points, which are executed in every failed test case, as suspect of bugs and ranks them based on the frequency they appear in passed test cases. We develop a prototype tool named JFAULT which locates faults by reporting sorted suspicious program points. Programmers could examine them one by one until the fault was found. We conduct detailed experiments to compare our approach with previously proposed technique. The experimental results show that our approach has the potential to be effective in localizing faults.