A Survey on Software Fault Localization

Software fault localization, the act of identifying the locations of faults in a program, is widely recognized to be one of the most tedious, time consuming, and expensive - yet equally critical - activities in program debugging. Due to the increasing scale and complexity of software today, manually locating faults when failures occur is rapidly becoming infeasible, and consequently, there is a strong demand for techniques that can guide software developers to the locations of faults in a program with minimal human intervention. This demand in turn has fueled the proposal and development of a broad spectrum of fault localization techniques, each of which aims to streamline the fault localization process and…