Database-Aware Fault Localization for Dynamic Web Applications

Abstract

Localizing and fixing software faults is an important maintenance task. In a dynamic Web application, localizing the faults is challenging due to its dynamic nature and the interactions between the application and databases. The faults could occur in the statements in the host program or inside the queries that are sent from the application to be executed in the database engines. This paper presents SQLook, a novel databaseaware fault localization method that is able to locate output faults in PHP statements of a dynamic Web application as well as in SQL queries. In SQLook, a PHP interpreter is instrumented to execute an SQL query and to monitor the evaluation of those SQL predicates to determine if they affect the output process of individual data records. It performs row-based slicing across PHP statements and SQL queries to record the entities that are involved in the output of each data row. Our empirical evaluation shows that SQLook can achieve higher accuracy than the stateof-the-art database-aware fault localization approach.

Learning to Combine Multiple Ranking Metrics for Fault Localization

“…Gong et al [10] propose a framework of interactive fault localization, which leverages simple user feedback to improve the accuracy. Nguyen et al [19] design a database-aware approach, SQLook, for the scenario of fault localization in dynamic web applications. Zhang et al [35] propose FIFL, a fault injecting approach to localizing faulty edits in evolving programs.…”