Key scientific issues and state-art of automatic software fault localization

Bugs in source code is a major cause of software unreliability. Automatic fault localization is a technique which detects program anomalies by analyzing the source code or runtime states of the software. It can isolate anomalies as suspicious code lines which need further debugging, so as to narrow down the searching space. With automatic fault localization techniques, software developers can identify bugs more quickly and understand the root cause of the software failure more deeply. In order to facilitate the analysis of the key issues in software fault localization, a "failure-fault localization-comprehension" model is defined, and the related concepts are formally described. Then, state-art of software fault localization is reviewed, and the development trend is statistically analyzed. Next, the main ideas, advantages and disadvantages of typical software fault localization methods are demonstrated in detail. Finally, key scientific problems which need further researched are summarized.