Fault Interference and Coupling Effect

Any program may contain more than one fault, and these faults may interfere with each other in a variety of ways. Software behavior may be affected by the interference, resulting in some uncertain results. Such results have negative impact on many software engineering tasks, including regression testing, fault localization, debugging, fault clustering etc. Therefore, understanding the interference becomes an important topic. This paper investigates the fault interference from the perspective of software construction. We introduce the coupling of software construction in order to explain the reasons for fault interference. We observed that different types of coupling may cause three kinds of fault interference and have different probabilities to make the software strike the fault interference traps. We conducted a preliminary experiment on four industrial programs. The results show that our approach gives a good explanation on fault interference.