Title: Combinatorial Testing-Based Fault Localization
Date/Time: Wednesday, 9/25/2013 @ 2pm
Location: 4201, Nguyen Engineering Building
Abstract: Combinatorial testing has been shown to be a very effective testing strategy. After a failure is detected by testing, the next task is fault localization, i.e.,
how to locate the fault that causes the failure. In this talk, I will discuss a fault localization approach we have developed that leverages the result of combinatorial testing. Our approach consists of two major steps. At the first step, we identify failure-inducing
combinations in a combinatorial test set. A combination is failure-inducing if its existence causes a test to fail. Based on the execution result of a combinatorial test set, we produce a ranking of suspicious combinations in terms of their likelihood to be
inducing. At the second step, we create a small group of tests from a given failure-inducing combination. In the group, one test is referred to as the core member, and it produces a failed execution. The other tests are referred to as the derived members which
are similar to the core member but produce passed executions. The traces of these test executions are then analyzed to locate the faults. Experimental results show that our approach is very effective in that only a small number of additional tests are needed
to locate the faults. To the best of our knowledge, our approach is the first effort to perform code-based fault localization based on combinatorial testing.
Bio: Yu Lei is currently an associate professor of computer science at the University of Texas at Arlington. He was a Member of Technical Staff in Fujistu Network
Communications, Inc. from 1998 to 2001. He obtained his PhD degree from North Carolina State University in 2002. His research interests are in the area of automated software analysis, testing and verification, with a special focus on combinatorial testing
and concurrency testing. His current research is supported by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology.