Current metrics for assessing the adequacy of a test-suite plainly focus on the number of components (be it lines, branches, paths) covered by the suite, but do not explicitly check how the tests actually exercise these components and whether they provide enough information so that spectrum-based fault localization techniques can perform accurate fault isolation. We propose a metric, called DDU, aimed at complementing adequacy measurements by quantifying a test-suite's diagnosability, i.e., the effectiveness of applying spectrum-based fault localization to pinpoint faults in the code in the event of test failures. Our aim is to increase the value generated by creating thorough test-suites, so they are not only regarded as error detection mechanisms but also as effective diagnostic aids that help widely-used fault-localization techniques to accurately pinpoint the location of bugs in the system. We have performed a topology-based simulation of thousands of spectra and have found that DDU can effectively establish an upper bound on the effort to diagnose faults. Furthermore, our empirical experiments using the Defects4J dataset show that optimizing a test suite with respect to DDU yields a 34 percent gain in spectrum-based fault localization report accuracy when compared to the standard branch-coverage metric.

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In the last two decades, a great amount of effort has been put in researching automated debugging techniques to support developers in the debugging process. However, in a widely cited user study published in 2011, Parnin and Orso found that research in automated debugging techniques made assumptions that do not hold in practice, and suggested four research directions to remedy this: absolute evaluation metrics, result comprehension, ecosystems, and user studies. In this study, we revisit the research directions proposed by the authors, offering an overview of the progress that the research community has made in addressing them since 2011. We observe that new absolute evaluation metrics and result comprehension techniques have been proposed, while research in ecosystems and user studies remains mostly unexplored. We analyze what is hard about these unexplored directions and propose avenues for further research in the area of fault localization. @en

Current metrics for assessing the adequacy of a test- suite plainly focus on the number of components (be it lines, branches, paths) covered by the suite, but do not explicitly check how the tests actually exercise these components and whether they provide enough information so that spectrum-based fault localization techniques can perform accurate fault isolation. We propose a metric, called DDU, aimed at complementing adequacy measurements by quantifying a test-suite’s diagnosability, i.e., the effectiveness of applying spectrum-based fault localization to pinpoint faults in the code in the event of test failures. Our aim is to increase the value generated by creating thorough test-suites, so they are not only regarded as error detection mechanisms but also as effective diagnostic aids that help widely-used fault- localization techniques to accurately pinpoint the location of bugs in the system. Our experiments show that optimizing a test suite with respect to DDU yields a 34% gain in spectrum-based fault localization report accuracy when compared to the standard branch-coverage metric.@en