Advances in automatic fault localization techniques

One of the most expensive and time-consuming activities of the debugging process is locating the faults. To guide the developers to locate and correct program errors, automatic fault localization techniques identify possible locations of faults by analyzing the source code, test outcomes and various program spectra. This work classifies current techniques and introduces principles and models of representative ones. Some widely-used benchmarks and evaluation metrics are provided. Finally, some on-going research issues are discussed.