Abstract:Coverage-based fault localization is a common technique that identifies the executing program elements correlating with failure. However, the effectiveness of coverage-based fault localization suffers from the effect of coincidental correctness which occurs when a fault is executed but no failure is detected. Coincidental correctness is prevalent. In the previous work, a method is proposed to estimate the probability that coincidental correctness happens for each program execution using dynamic data-flow analysis and control-flow analysis. In this study, a new fault-localization approach is proposed based on the coincidental correctness probability. To evaluate the proposed approach, safety and precision are used as evaluation metrics. The experiment involved Siemens test suite from Software-artifact Infrastructure Repository (SIR) which is mostly used in related works. The results are compared with Tarantula and the fault-localization technique based on coincidental correctness probability. The results show that the proposed approach can improve the safety and precision of the fault-localization technique significantly.