Metallaxis‐FL: mutation‐based fault localization

By Mike Papadakis, Yves Le Traon. Software testing, verification & reliability, 2015

364 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Fault localization methods seek to identify faulty program statements based on the information provided by the failing and passing test executions. Spectrum‐based methods are among the most popular ones and assist programmers by assigning suspiciousness values on program statements according to their probability of being faulty. This paper proposes Metallaxis, a fault localization approach based on mutation analysis. The innovative part of Metallaxis is that it uses mutants and links them with the faulty program places. Thus, mutants that are killed mostly by failing tests provide a good indication about the location of a fault. Experimentation using Metallaxis suggests that it is significantly more effective than statement‐based approaches. This is true even in the case where mutation cost‐reduction techniques, such as mutant sampling, are facilitated. Additionally, results from a controlled experiment show that the use of mutation as a testing technique provides benefits to the fault localization process. Therefore, fault localization is significantly improved by using mutation‐based tests instead of block‐based or branch‐based test suites. Finally, evidence in support of the methods’ scalability is also given. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Subfields: Information Systems, Software

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/042fa7eb5edb9ea729ec5f339c78446a5a1ec36f

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Information Systems

1. Lingming Zhang
2. Chun Xia
3. Yinlin Deng
4. Mike Papadakis
5. Yves Le Traon
6. Yue Jia
7. Soren Dunn
8. Mark Harman

In Software

1. Lingming Zhang
2. Chun Xia
3. Yinlin Deng
4. Yves Le Traon
5. Mike Papadakis
6. Yue Jia
7. Soren Dunn
8. Gordon Fraser

Citations in the corpus

• Evaluating and Improving Fault Localization (2017, methodology): “…techniques: spectrum-based fault localization (SBFL techniques for short) [3], [18], [31], [44], which is the most studied and evaluated FL technique; and mutation-based fault localization (MBFL techniques for short), which is reported to significantly outperform SBFL techniques [30], [33].”
• Agentless: Demystifying LLM-based Software Engineering Agents (2024, methodology): “Dynamic FL techniques mainly include spectrum-based FL (SBFL) [47, 25, 24] and mutation-based FL (MBFL) [77, 68, 63].”
• Chapter Six - Mutation Testing Advances: An Analysis and Survey (2019, methodology): “Mutation-based fault localisation was introduce by Papadakis and Le Traon [17, 241] with their work on the Metallaxis method.”