A Fault Propagation-aware Program Fault Location Method

Based on the existing Coverage-Based Fault-Localization (CBFL) methods can not effectively solve the problem of failure propagation impact for the location precision, this paper proposes a propagation-aware program fault location method. This method uses the collected information of program covering paths to compress the suspicious nodes space and reduces effectively the computational complexity, then uses nodes frequency information appearing in normal and fault execution paths to compute each nodes initial suspicious degree. By introducing the concept of edge propagation trend, the method perceives fault propagation for the node having the maximum initial suspicious degree and finally revises the initial suspicious degree for related nodes. The results of the analysis and experiments show that the method can effectively reduce the impact of the propagation for the location precision and has great advantage of time consuming than other methods when the expansion of the scale of program, so has high practical value.