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Selected publications by date
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Empirical Evaluation of the Tarantula Automatic Fault-Localization Technique
Proceedings of the 20th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering
November 2005, pp. 273-282.
James A. Jones and Mary Jean Harrold
Abstract
The high cost of locating faults in programs has motivated the
development of techniques that assist in fault localization by
automating part of the process of searching for faults. Empirical
studies that compare these techniques have reported the relative
effectiveness of four existing techniques on a set of
subjects. These studies compare the rankings that the techniques
compute for statements in the subject programs and the effectiveness
of these rankings in locating the faults.
However, it is unknown how
these four techniques compare with Tarantula, another existing
fault-localization technique, although this technique also provides
a way to rank statements in terms of their suspiciousness.
Thus, we
performed a study to compare the Tarantula technique with the four
techniques previously compared. This paper presents our study---it
overviews the Tarantula technique along with the four other
techniques studied, describes our experiment, and reports and
discusses the results. Our studies show that, on the same set of
subjects, the Tarantula technique consistently outperforms the other
four techniques in terms of effectiveness in fault localization, and
is comparable in efficiency to the least expensive of the other four
techniques.
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