FPA-FL: Incorporating static fault-proneness analysis into statistical fault localization

Despite the proven applicability of the statistical methods in automatic fault localization, these approaches are biased by data collected from different executions of the program. This biasness could result in unstable statistical models which may vary dependent on test data provided for trial executions of the program. To resolve the difficulty, in this article a new 'fault-proneness'-aware statistical approach based on Elastic-Net regression, namely FPA-FL is proposed. The main idea behind FPA-FL is to consider the static structure and the fault-proneness of the program statements in addition to their dynamic correlations with the program termination state. The grouping effect of FPA-FL is helpful for finding multiple faults and supporting scalability. To provide the context of failure, cause-effect chains of program faults are discovered. FPA-FL is evaluated from different viewpoints on well-known test suites. The results reveal high fault localization performance of our approach, compared with similar techniques in the literature.