A Survey on Fault Localization Techniques

A considerable body of work on debugging and particularly in fault localization has been published in the past decades. This paper summarizes the underlying ideas behind locating faults and presents the different techniques that are currently available to tackle the challenging task that is diagnosing faulty software systems and groups them into different categories: traditional debugging techniques (such as assertions and breakpoints), program slicing, delta debugging and coverage-based, as well as model-based approaches to debugging are detailed. A comparison between such diagnosis techniques is performed, and the challenges and potential future directions of software fault localization are also discussed. Keywords-Debugging, diagnosis, fault localization, software testing.

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