Abstract—Spectrum-based Fault Localization (SBFL) is a popular fault localization technique that ranks statements in a program according to their suspiciousness to be faulty based on the statement execution records (spectra) of pass and fail test cases. Many SBFL metrics have been proposed with varying accuracies in ranking of faulty statement. In this paper we proposed a new SBFL metric based on a pair scoring approach. We evaluated the performance of the proposed metric and compare it with other existing SBFL metrics. Despite its simplicity, we found the proposed metric outperformed majority of the existing SBFL metrics.

Index Terms—Software Engineering, Software Testing, Debugging, Spectrum-based Fault Localization

Cite: Patrick Daniel and Kwan Yong Sim, "Spectrum-based Fault Localization: A Pair Scoring Approach," Journal of Industrial and Intelligent Information, Vol. 1, No. 4, pp. 185-190, December 2013. doi: 10.12720/jiii.1.4.185-190