Automatic software fault localization based on artificial bee colony

Software debugging accounts for a vast majority of the financial and time costs in software developing and maintenance. Thus, approaches of software fault localization that can help automate the debugging process have become a hot topic in the field of software engineering. Given the great demand for software fault localization, an approach based on the artificial bee colony （ABC） algorithm is proposed to be integrated with other related techniques. In this process, the source program is initially instrumented after analyzing the dependence information. The test case sets are then compiled and run on the instrumented program, and execution results are input to the ABC algorithm. The algorithm can determine the largest fitness value and best food source by calculating the average fitness of the employed bees in the iteralive process. The program unit with the highest suspicion score corresponding to the best test case set is regarded as the final fault localization. Experiments are conducted with the TCAS program in the Siemens suite. Results demonstrate that the proposed fault localization method is effective and efficient. The ABC algorithm can efficiently avoid the local optimum, and ensure the validity of the fault location to a larger extent.

Explainable Software Fault Localization Model: From Blackbox to Whitebox

The most resource-intensive and laborious part of debugging is finding the exact location of the fault from the more significant number of code snippets.Plenty of machine intelligence models has offered the effective localization of defects.Some models can precisely locate the faulty with more than 95%accuracy,resulting in demand for trustworthy models in fault localization.Confidence and trustworthiness within machine intelligencebased software models can only be achieved via explainable artificial intelligence in Fault Localization(XFL).The current study presents a model for generating counterfactual interpretations for the fault localization model’s decisions.Neural system approximations and disseminated presentation of input information may be achieved by building a nonlinear neural network model.That demonstrates a high level of proficiency in transfer learning,even with minimal training data.The proposed XFL would make the decisionmaking transparent simultaneously without impacting the model’s performance.The proposed XFL ranks the software program statements based on the possible vulnerability score approximated from the training data.The model’s performance is further evaluated using various metrics like the number of assessed statements,confidence level of fault localization,and TopN evaluation strategies.

Bug localization based on syntactical and semantic information of source code

The existing software bug localization models treat the source file as natural language, which leads to the loss of syntactical and structure information of the source file. A bug localization model based on syntactical and semantic information of source code is proposed. Firstly, abstract syntax tree(AST) is divided based on node category to obtain statement sequence. The statement tree is encoded into vectors to capture lexical and syntactical knowledge at the statement level.Secondly, the source code is transformed into vector representation by the sequence naturalness of the statement. Therefore,the problem of gradient vanishing and explosion caused by a large AST size is obviated when using AST to the represent source code. Finally, the correlation between bug reports and source files are comprehensively analyzed from three aspects of syntax, semantics and text to locate the buggy code. Experiments show that compared with other standard models, the proposed model improves the performance of bug localization, and it has good advantages in mean reciprocal rank(MRR), mean average precision(MAP) and Top N Rank.