CFaults: Model-Based Diagnosis for Fault Localization in C Programs with Multiple Test Cases
<|reference_start|>CFaults: Model-Based Diagnosis for Fault Localization in C Programs with Multiple Test Cases: Debugging is one of the most time-consuming and expensive tasks in software development. Several formula-based fault localization (FBFL) methods have been proposed, but they fail to guarantee a set of diagnoses across all failing tests or may produce redundant diagnoses that are not subset-minimal, particularly for programs with multiple faults.   This paper introduces a novel fault localization approach for C programs with multiple faults. CFaults leverages Model-Based Diagnosis (MBD) with multiple observations and aggregates all failing test cases into a unified MaxSAT formula. Consequently, our method guarantees consistency across observations and simplifies the fault localization procedure. Experimental results on two benchmark sets of C programs, TCAS and C-Pack-IPAs, show that CFaults is faster than other FBFL approaches like BugAssist and SNIPER. Moreover, CFaults only generates subset-minimal diagnoses of faulty statements, whereas the other approaches tend to enumerate redundant diagnoses.<|reference_end|>
@article{orvalho2024cfaults:,
    title={CFaults: Model-Based Diagnosis for Fault Localization in C Programs with
  Multiple Test Cases},
    author={Pedro Orvalho and Mikol'av{s} Janota and Vasco Manquinho},
    journal={In the 26th international symposium on Formal Methods, FM 2024},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2407.09337},
    primaryClass={cs.SE cs.AI cs.LO}
}