April 29, 2024
The paper titled “Context Switch Sensitive Fault Localization”, written by Dr. Ferenc Horváth, Roland Aszmann, Péter Attila Soha, Dr. Árpád Beszédes, and Dr. Tibor Gyimóthy has been selected for a Distinguished Paper Award by the program committee of the upcoming Core A conference, EASE 2024.
Out of all the accepted papers only three were awarded the title.
The paper investigates the impact of context switching on Spectrum-Based Fault Localization (SBFL) during the debugging process. It explores how developers navigate between different code parts while searching for faulty statements, finding that investigating neighboring statements is less difficult than jumping between methods and classes. By analyzing programs from the Defects4J benchmark, the study reveals that developers typically explore 40 methods and 12 classes on average before finding a bug.
To address this, the paper introduces a novel context-aware metric and an optimized traversal algorithm, reducing the number of investigated statements by 12% and class/method switches by 52%.