Balogh, Gergő

Beszédes, Árpád

Horváth, Ferenc

Schnepper Lacerda, Victor

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iFL for Eclipse – A Tool to SupportInteractive Fault Localization in Eclipse IDEGergo˝ Balogh Victor Schnepper Lacerda Ferenc Horváth Árpád BeszédesDepartment of Software Engineering, University of Szeged{geryxyz,lacerda,hferenc,beszedes}@inf.u-szeged.huI. INTERACTIVE FAULT LOCALIZATIONWe present a tool to aid Spectrum-Based Fault Localization(SBFL) [1]. SBFL provides a ranked list of suspicious codeelements to the user based on statistical analysis of test execu-tion outcomes and code coverage. Recent studies highlightedsome barriers to the wide adoption of SBFL, including a highnumber of suggested elements to investigate [2], and otherissues [3]. A possibility to increase the practical usefulnessof SBFL tools is to involve interactivity. In our approach,called iFL, we involve the user’s previous knowledge aboutthe system: the developer interacts with the fault localizationalgorithm by giving feedback on the elements of the prioritizedlist. Contextual knowledge of the user about the ranked items,classes of methods in our case, is used to reposition larger codeentities in their suspiciousness, thus aiding the FL process.The benefits of developer’s additional knowledge have alreadybeen explored. For example, Li et al. [4] reuse the knowledgeabout passing parameter values, while Gong et al. [5] ask onlyfor a simple yes/no feedback for a given statement. To ourknowledge, contextual information about higher level entitieshas not yet been leveraged for interactive SBFL.II. BENEFITS AND CONTRIBUTIONSFL is a debugging activity in which, by definition, theprogrammer interacts with the source code of the softwarebeing debugged, which can be performed most effectivelythrough the IDE itself. iFL for Eclipse supports iFL for Javaprojects developed in this environment. The plug-in readsthe tree of project elements (classes and methods) and liststhem in a table with detailed information. This includes thesuspiciousness scores calculated using a traditional SBFLformula such as Tarantula. Interactivity between the tool andthe programmer is achieved by providing the possibility tosend feedback to the FL engine about the table elements andtheir context. The user can choose from the following options:(1) the item is faulty (the process stops), (2) it is not faulty norits context (they are moved lower in the rank), or (3) it is notfaulty but the context is suspicious (they are ranked higher).III. TECHNICAL DETAILSiFL for Eclipse is a plug-in supporting Java 10 and later,and Eclipse 2018-12 and later. It is published via an updatesite (at the time of submission, it is available as a prototypebut the first release will be made open source before thedemonstration). The tool uses JDT to detect the methods fromthe source code from an Eclipse Java project. In the presentphase, the scores are loaded from an external FL tool. Userinteraction is session-based and is tied to one active project.The main UI is an Eclipse graphical panel, serving as the frontend. The purpose of the back-end is the update of scores andthe recalculation of the rank list based on user input.Current state: At the present state of our research agenda,the demonstrated tool serves our research purposes: to in-vestigate the feasibility and effectiveness of iFL. As such, itis in a prototype state, not thoroughly tested and validated.The tool will be made open source, along with the results ofassociated experiments, in order to enable other researchers itsindependent validation and further development. In terms offunctionality, currently it includes the basic features but thereare many possibilities for further development. Our primaryplans are to increase usability and flexibility in terms ofuser feedback actions and the underlying FL computation.Ongoing research is to perform user studies to investigate theeffectiveness of the proposed iFL approach and the tool itself.IV. DEMONSTRATION PLANDuring the live demonstration, we will give a walkthroughof all features of the tool. The main features will be first pre-sented on a simple example, and then a more complex (opensource) project will be used to demonstrate the usefulness ofthe approach in actual fault finding. The video showing theplanned demonstration is available at:https://youtu.be/AYkcjmSgkA0.REFERENCES[1] W. E. Wong, R. Gao, Y. Li, R. Abreu, and F. Wotawa, “A survey onsoftware fault localization,” IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering,vol. 42, no. 8, pp. 707–740, 2016.[2] C. Parnin and A. Orso, “Are automated debugging techniques actuallyhelping programmers?” in Proceedings of the 2011 International Sympo-sium on Software Testing and Analysis, 2011, pp. 199–209.[3] P. S. Kochhar, X. Xia, D. Lo, and S. Li, “Practitioners’ expectations onautomated fault localization,” in Proceedings of the 25th InternationalSymposium on Software Testing and Analysis, 2016, pp. 165–176.[4] X. Li, S. Zhu, M. d’Amorim, and A. Orso, “Enlightened debugging,”in Proceedings of the 40th IEEE and ACM SIGSOFT InternationalConference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2018), 2018, pp. 82–92.[5] L. Gong, D. Lo, L. Jiang, and H. Zhang, “Interactive fault localizationleveraging simple user feedback,” in IEEE International Conference onSoftware Maintenance, ICSM, 2012, pp. 67–76.This work was supported by the János Bolyai ResearchScholarship of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

iFL for Eclipse — A Tool to Support Interactive Fault Localization in Eclipse IDE

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