  Recent research demonstrated that mutation-based fault localization
techniques are relatively accurate and practical. However, these methods have
never been compared and have only been assessed with simple hand-seeded faults.
Therefore, their actual practicality is questionable when it comes to real-wold
faults. To deal with this limitation we asses and compare the two main
mutation-based fault localization methods, named Metallaxis and MUSE, on a set
of real-world programs and faults. Our results based on three typical
evaluation metrics indicate that mutation-based fault localization methods are
relatively accurate and provide relevant information to developers. Overall,
our result indicate that Metallaxis and MUSE require 18% and 37% of the program
statements to find the sought faults. Additionally, both methods locate 50% and
80% of the studied faults when developers inspect 10 and 25 statements.

Software Engineering