Abstract Identifying the location of faults in programs has been recognized as one of the most manually and time cost activities during software debugging process. Fault localization techniques, which seek to identify faulty program statements as quickly as possible, can assist developers in alleviating the time and manual cost of software debugging. Mutation-based fault localization(MBFL) has a promising fault localization accuracy, but suffered from huge mutation execution cost. To reduce the cost of MBFL, we propose a Hybrid Mutation Execution Reduction(HMER) approach in this paper. HMER consists of two steps: Weighted Statement-Oriented Mutant Sampling(WSOME) and Dynamic Mutation Execution Strategy(DMES). In the first step, we employ Spectrum-Based Fault Localization(SBFL) techniques to calculate the suspiciousness value of statements, and guarantee that the mutants generated from statements with higher suspiciousness value will have more chance to be remained in the sampling process. Next, a dynamic mutation execution strategy is used to execute the reduced mutant set on test suite to avoid worthless execution. Empirical results on 130 versions from 9 subject programs show that HMER can reduce 74.5%-93.4% mutation execution cost while keeping almost the same fault localization accuracy with the original MBFL. A further W i l c o x o n s i g n e d − r a n k t e s t indicates that when employing HMER strategy in MBFL, the fault localization accuracy has no statistically significant difference in most cases compared with the original MBFL without any reduction techniques.

中文翻译：

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HMER：一种用于基于突变的故障定位的混合突变执行减少方法

摘要 识别程序中的故障位置已被公认为是软件调试过程中最耗费人工和时间的活动之一。故障定位技术旨在尽快识别错误的程序语句，可以帮助开发人员减少软件调试的时间和人工成本。基于变异的故障定位（MBFL）具有良好的故障定位精度，但存在巨大的变异执行成本。为了降低 MBFL 的成本，我们在本文中提出了一种混合变异执行减少（HMER）方法。HMER 包括两个步骤：Weighted Statement-Oriented Mutant Sampling(WSOME) 和 Dynamic Mutation Execution Strategy(DMES)。第一步，我们采用基于频谱的故障定位（SBFL）技术来计算语句的可疑度值，并保证从可疑值较高的语句产生的变异将有更多的机会留在采样过程中。接下来，使用动态变异执行策略在测试套件上执行减少的变异集以避免无价值的执行。对来自 9 个主题程序的 130 个版本的实证结果表明，HMER 可以减少 74.5%-93.4% 的变异执行成本，同时保持与原始 MBFL 几乎相同的故障定位精度。进一步的 W ilcoxonsigned − ranktest 表明，当在 MBFL 中采用 HMER 策略时，与没有任何减少技术的原始 MBFL 相比，故障定位精度在大多数情况下没有统计上的显着差异。