How Test Suites Impact Fault Localization Starting from the Size

What is it about?

Although a test suite is indispensable for conducting effective fault localization, not much work has been done to study how the test suite impacts fault localization. This paper presents a systematic study for a deeper understanding of their relation. Our result is drawn from a large-scale empirical analysis on the localization effectiveness with respect to randomly sampled test suites. This paper presents the details of the study and our follow-up investigation on the findings.

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Why is it important?

our study reveals an interesting fact that there is no strong correlation between localization effectiveness and the size of the test suite. We show that, in a test suite, (1) the passing test cases that do not execute the faulty statements and the failing test cases have a positive effect on fault localization effectiveness, while (2) the passing test cases that exercise the faulty statements have a negative impact on localization performance.

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