Using distinguishing tests to reduce the number of fault candidates
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Abstract
Tools for automated fault localization usually generate too many bug candidates depending on the underlying technique. Hence, further information is required in order to further restrict the bug candidates. Approaches that rely on specific knowledge of the program to be debugged like variable values at specific position in the source code, are not easily accessible for users especially in case of software maintenance. In order to avoid this problem we suggest to integrate testing for restricting the number of bug candidates. In particular, we suggest to compute possible corrections of the program and from this, distinguishing test cases. A distinguishing test case is a test that reveals different output values for two given program variants, given the same input values. Besides the formal definitions, and algorithms we present the first empirical results of our approach. The use of mutations and distinguishing test cases substantially reduces the number of bug candidates.
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