Experimental evaluation of program slicing for fault localization

Debugging large and complex software systems requires significant effort since it is very difficult to localize and identify faults. Program slicing has been proposed to efficiently localize faults in the program. Despite the fact that a number of debug systems using program slicing, have been developed, the usefulness of this method to fault localization has not been sufficiently evaluated. This paper aims to experimentally evaluate the usefulness of the program slicing method to fault localization. In order to conduct the experiment, we first developed a debug tool based on program slicing, after which two experimental projects were conducted, in which subjects (debuggers) were divided into two groups. A program that includes several faults is given to each subject of the group. Each subject in Group 1 localizes the faults by using the slicing-based method, whereas in Group 2 each subject localizes the faults by using the conventional debugger-based method. Finally, the effectiveness of program slicing is analyzed by comparing the data collected from both groups. As the results of these experiments, we confirm that the program slicing method is indeed useful to localize program faults.