Debugging in Parallel or Sequential: An Empirical Study

Faults need to be identified, localized, and removed from programs. Empirical studies show that coverage-based faults localizations effectively target bugs, even in the presence of multiple faults. Debugging is a time-consuming activity and thus it is beneficial to accelerate the process by employing appropriate techniques. The need for speeding up the debugging process is even more immense when the program under test contains multiple faults. A program with multiple faults can be debugged in parallel where each sub-process specifically targets localizing one of the bugs. The immediate research question that arises here is that how significant is the improvement and performance achieved when debugging is performed in parallel compared to the sequential fault localization strategy. This paper investigates and compares the performance of parallel and sequential debugging in effectively localizing faults where the performance is measured according to fault localization cost required by each strategy. Based on the experimental study of several open source Java programs conducted in this paper, we observe that debugging when is performed in parallel outperforms sequential strategy in terms of the total cost.