A Selective Mutation based Fault Localization Method and the Experimental Evaluation

The mutation-based fault localization method can only locate faults related to the mutation operators. If the types of mutation operators are not enough or mutation operators are selected improperly, it will affect the localization accuracy. To solve this problem, the paper proposes four kinds of new mutation operators on the basis of the current mutation operators and implements a selective mutation-based fault localization method. The experimental results on the standard test suite Siemens show that our method has higher effectiveness comparing with Tarantula, LEAP, the state dependency probabilistic-based and joint dependency probabilistic-based method. The proposed mutation operators are proved to be able to locate the faults that the current operators could not locate, and can improve the rank of the faults that the current operators can locate as well.