FaultTracer: a change impact and regression fault analysis tool for evolving Java programs

Abstract

Keeping evolving software fault-free is hard. In our previous work, we proposed FaultTracer, a change impact and regression fault analysis tool for evolving programs. It takes the old and new versions of a program and a regression test suite as inputs, and then identifies affected tests---a subset of tests relevant to the program differences between the two versions and affecting changes---a subset of atomic changes relevant to each affected test. It adapts spectrum-based fault localization techniques and applies them in tandem with an enhanced change impact analysis to identify and rank failure-inducing program edits. We have shown that FaultTracer, compared to existing techniques (e.g., Chianti), achieves improvement in selecting influenced tests, determining suspicious failure-inducing edits, and ranking failure-inducing program edits. In this paper, we show the design, implementation, and demonstration of our FaultTracer approach as a publicly available toolkit for testing and debugging Java programs.