An Optimized Approach of Fault Distribution for Debugging in Parallel

Software Debugging is the most time consuming and costly process in the software development process. Many techniques have been proposed to isolate different faults in a program thereby creating separate sets of failing program statements. Debugging in parallel is a technique which proposes distribution of a single faulty program segment into many fault focused program slices to be debugged simultaneously by multiple debuggers. In this paper we propose a new technique called Faulty Slice Distribution (FSD) to make parallel debugging more efficient by measuring the time and labor associated with a slice. Using this measure we then distribute these faulty slices evenly among debuggers. For this we propose an algorithm that estimates an optimized group of faulty slices using as a parameter the priority assigned to each slice as computed by value of their complexity. This helps in the efficient merging of two or more slices for distribution among debuggers so that debugging can be performed in parallel. To validate the effectiveness of this proposed technique we explain the process using example. Keywords—Clustering, Debugging, Fault Localization, Optimization, Software Testing