Interdisciplinary Survey of Fault Localization Techniques to Aid Software Engineering

Fault localization (narrowing down the cause of a failure to a small number of suspicious components of the system) is an important concern in many different engineering fields and there have been a large number of algorithmic solutions proposed to aid this activity. In this work, we performed a systematic analysis of related literature, not limiting the search to any specific engineering field, with the aim to find solutions in non-software areas that could be successfully adapted to software fault localization. We found out that few areas have significant literature, in this topic, that are good candidates for adaptation (computer networks, for instance), and that although some classes of methods are less suitable, there are useful ideas in almost all fields that could potentially be reused for software fault localization.

Keywords: faults/defects/failures; fault localization; software fault localization; literature review; method assessment