Fault Localization Analysis Based on Deep Neural Network

With software’s increasing scale and complexity, software failure is inevitable. To date, although many kinds of software fault localization methods have been proposed and have had respective achievements, they also have limitations. In particular, for fault localization techniques based on machine learning, the models available in literatures are all shallow architecture algorithms. Having shortcomings like the restricted ability to express complex functions under limited amount of sample data and restricted generalization ability for intricate problems, the faults cannot be analyzed accurately via those methods. To that end, we propose a fault localization method based on deep neural network (DNN). This approach is capable of achieving the complex function approximation and attaining distributed representation for input data by learning a deep nonlinear network structure. It also shows a strong capability of learning representation from a small sized training dataset. Our DNN-based model is trained utilizing the coverage data and the results of test cases as input and we further locate the faults by testing the trained model using the virtual test suite. This paper conducts experiments on the Siemens suite and Space program. The results demonstrate that our DNN-based fault localization technique outperforms other fault localization methods like BPNN, Tarantula, and so forth.