2019/11/18 by Son Nguyen, Nguyen, Son
Computer Science · #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Software Engineering (cs.SE) #Software Engineering Research #Software Reliability and Analysis Research #Software Testing and Debugging Techniques
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1911.07906
openalex publication_date 2019/11/18 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
In a buggy configurable system, configuration-dependent bugs cause the failures in only certain configurations due to unexpected interactions among features. Manually localizing configuration-dependent faults in configurable systems could be highly time-consuming due to their complexity. However, the cause of configuration-dependent bugs is not considered by existing automated fault localization techniques, which are designed to localize bugs in non-configurable code. Thus, their capacity for efficient configuration-dependent localization is limited. In this work, we propose CoFL, a novel approach to localize configuration-dependent bugs by identifying and analyzing suspicious feature interactions that potentially cause the failures in buggy configurable systems. We evaluated the efficiency of CoFL in fault localization of artificial configuration-dependent faults in a highly-configurable system. We found that CoFL significantly improves the baseline spectrum-based approaches. With CoFL, on average, the correctness in ranking the buggy statements increases more than 7 times, and the search space is significantly narrowed down, about 15 times.