Fault localization based on failure-inducing combinations

Combinatorial testing has been shown to be a very effective testing strategy. After a failure is detected, the next task is to identify the fault that causes the failure. In this paper, we present an approach to fault localization that leverages the result of combinatorial testing. Our approach is based on a notion called failure-inducing combinations. A combination is failure-inducing if it causes any test in which it appears to fail. Given a failure-inducing combination, our approach derives a group of tests that are likely to exercise similar traces but produce different outcomes. These tests are then analyzed to locate the faults. We conducted an experiment in which our approach was applied to the Siemens suite as well as the grep program from the SIR repository that has 10068 lines of code. The experimental results show that our approach can effectively and efficiently localize the faults in these programs.