I am thrilled to share the exciting news that our paper titled “Fonte: Finding Bug Inducing Commits from Failures” has been accepted at ICSE 2023. This work builds upon our previous research on Reducing the Search Space of Bug Inducing Commits (BICs) Using Failure Coverage, where we proposed a technique to narrow down the search space for bug-inducing commits using the coverage of failing executions. In this latest paper, we introduce a novel method, named Fonte, for quantifying the suspiciousness of commits, moving beyond mere search space reduction.
Fonte is founded on a unique combination of Fault Localization (FL) and commit history mining. The core idea behind our approach is that
A commit is more likely to be a BIC if it introduced or modified code that is relevant to a particular failure.
To measure the relevance of code elements to the observed failure, we employ Fault Localization techniques. We then devise a voting system wherein each code element “votes” for the commits that introduced or modified it. The voting power of a code element is determined by its FL ranking, with a decay factor applied to older commits. This decay factor stems from our hypothesis that older commits are less likely to be responsible for the current failure.
Our evaluation demonstrates that Fonte is highly effective in identifying bug-inducing commits based on fault localization scores and exhibits superior performance compared to IR-based BIC identification techniques. The detailed results and findings can be found in our paper!