October 16, 2020
The paper titled "Experiments with Interactive Fault Localization Using Simulated and Real Users,” authored by Ferenc Horváth, Árpád Beszédes, Béla Vancsics, Gergő Balogh, László Vidács and Tibor Gyimóthy (SZTE Department of Software Engineering) was presented at the 36th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME 2020).
The conference, originally to be held in Australia, was instead held online from September 27 – October 3.
The paper proposed a new approach to automated fault localization, which would aid the often limited and imprecise process. Using Spectrum-Based Fault Localization (SBFL), which produces a prioritized list of possibly faulty code elements, the new method lets the developer interact with the algorithm by giving it feedback on the elements of the list. The user’s contextual knowledge (even if often inaccurate) was shown to improve the fault localization’s efficiency considerably.
The paper can be read here.