%0 Journal Article
%J Journal of Systems and Software
%D 2010
%T Simultaneous debugging of software faults
%A Rui Abreu
%A Zoeteweij, Peter
%A Van Gemund, Arjan JC
%I Elsevier
%N 4
%P 573-586
%V 84
%X <p>(Semi-)automated diagnosis of software faults can drastically increase debugging efficiency, improving reliability and time-to-market. Current automatic diagnosis techniques are predominantly of a statistical nature and, despite typical defect densities, do not explicitly consider multiple faults, as also demonstrated by the popularity of the single-fault benchmark set of programs. We present a reasoning approach, called Zoltar-M(ultiple fault), that yields multiple-fault diagnoses, ranked in order of their probability. Although application of Zoltar-M to programs with many faults requires heuristics (trading-off completeness) to reduce the inherent computational complexity, theory as well as experiments on synthetic program models and multiple-fault program versions available from the software infrastructure repository (SIR) show that for multiple-fault programs this approach can outperform statistical techniques, notably spectrum-based fault localization (SFL). As a side-effect of this research, we present a new SFL variant, called Zoltar-S(ingle fault), that is optimal for single-fault programs, outperforming all other variants known to date.</p>
%> https://haslab.uminho.pt/sites/default/files/ruimaranhao/files/jss11.pdf