How well does test case prioritization integrate with statistical fault localization?

Abstract

Context: Effective test case prioritization shortens the time to detect failures, and yet the use of fewer test cases may compromise the effectiveness of subsequent fault localization. Objective: The paper aims at finding whether several previously identified effectiveness factors of test case prioritization techniques, namely strategy, coverage granularity, and time cost, have observable consequences on the effectiveness of statistical fault localization techniques. Method: This paper uses a controlled experiment to examine these factors. The experiment includes 16 test case prioritization techniques and four statistical fault localization techniques using the Siemens suite of programs as well as grep, gzip, sed, and flex as subjects. The experiment studies the effects of the percentage of code examined to locate faults from these benchmark subjects after a given number of failures have been observed. Results: We find that if testers have a budgetary concern on the number of test cases for regression testing, the use of test case prioritization can save up to 40% of test case executions for commit builds without significantly affecting the effectiveness of fault localization. A statistical fault localization technique using a smaller fraction of a prioritized test suite is found to compromise its effectiveness seriously. Despite the presence of some variations, the inclusion of more failed test cases will generally improve the fault localization effectiveness during the integration process. Interestingly, during the variation periods, adding more failed test cases actually deteriorates the fault localization effectiveness. In terms of strategies, Random is found to be the most effective, followed by the ART and Additional strategies, while the Total strategy is the least effective. We do not observe sufficient empirical evidence to conclude that using different coverage granularity levels have different overall effects. Conclusion: The paper empirically identifies that strategy and time-cost of test case prioritization techniques are key factors affecting the effectiveness of statistical fault localization, while coverage granularity is not a significant factor. It also identifies a mid-range deterioration in fault localization effectiveness when adding more test cases to facilitate debugging. © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.