Last updated on Monday, October 06, 2025
@inproceedings{Laghari2018Frontiers,
author = {Gulsher Laghari and Kamran Dahri and Serge Demeyer},
booktitle = {Proceedings {FIT 2018} (16th International Conference
on Frontiers of Information Technology)},
month = dec,
note = {Acceptance ratio: 76 / 335 = 23\%},
pages = {152-157},
publisher = {IEEE},
title = {Comparing Spectrum Based Fault Localisation Against
Test-to-Code Traceability Links},
year = {2018},
abstract = {The recent shift towards automated software tests
stimulated research interest in fault localisation.
Fault localisation addresses the question which
program elements need to be fixed to repair a failing
test. The current state of the art in that field is
named spectrum based fault localisation, which relies
on dynamic coverage information from both failing and
passing test cases to pinpoint the faulty program
elements. This is in sharp contrast with the naive
approach which extracts traceability links between
the test code and the program elements under test and
enumerates those until the faulty element is found.
In this paper we ask ourselves the question whether
the state-of-the-art approach (spectrum based fault
localisation) is so much better than the naive
approach (test-to-code traceability). We demonstrate
on 178 defects from three representative projects in
the recent Defects4J dataset that spectrum based
fault localisation does not perform better than
test-to-code traceability. This implies that future
improvements in spectrum based fault localisation
should also be compared against naive approaches,
such as test-to-code traceability.},
annote = {internationalconference},
doi = {10.1109/FIT.2018.00034},
issn = {2334-3141},
}