On the Localization of Branch Faults in Object-Oriented Program*

A common type of program fault is related to branch statements, which is referred to as branch fault. In an object-oriented (OO) programming paradigm, branch statements are typically used to implement state-dependent behavior of classes or clusters of classes. Thus, one effective way to locate the branch fault in an OO program is to identify a condition on the object or object cluster state that activates the fault. In this paper, we briefly present our recent work regarding this basic idea. The presented approach combines static and dynamic analysis. It first generates a set of suspicious candidates by extracting relevant predicates from the source code, and then filters out irrelevant candidates by analyzing program state history which is recorded incrementally in the executions of successl and failure-inducing test cases.