Boosting Spectrum-Based Fault Localization via Multi-Correct Programs in Online Programming

Providing students with useful feedback on faulty programs can effectively help students fix programs. Spectrum-Based Fault Location (SBFL), which is a widely studied and lightweight technique, can automatically generate a suspicious value of statement ranking to help users find potential faults in a program. However, the performance of SBFL on student programs is not satisfactory, to improve the accuracy of SBFL in student programs, we propose a novel Multi-Correct Programs based Fault Localization (MCPFL) approach. Specifically, We first collected the correct programs submitted by students on the OJ system according to the programming problem numbers and removed the highly similar correct programs based on code similarity, and then stored them together with the faulty program to be located to construct a set of programs. Afterward, we analyzed the suspiciousness of the term in the faulty program through the Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF). Finally, we designed a formula to calculate the weight of suspiciousness for program statements based on the number of input variables in the statement and weighted it to the spectrum-based fault localization formula. To evaluate the effectiveness of MCPFL, we conducted empirical studies on six student program datasets collected in our OJ system, and the results showed that MCPFL can effectively improve the traditional SBFL methods. In particular, on the EXAM metric, our approach improves by an average of 27.51% on the Dstar formula.