Software Feature Location in Practice: Debugging Aircraft Simulation Systems

In this paper, we report on a study that we have conducted at CAE, one of the largest civil aircraft simulation companies in the world, in which we have developed a feature location approach to help software engineers debug simulation scenarios. A simulation scenario consists of a set of software components, configured in a certain way. A simulation fails when it does not behave as intended. This is typically a sign of a configuration problem. To detect configuration errors, we propose FELODE (Feature Location for Debugging), an approach that uses a single trace combined with user queries. When applied to CAE systems, FELODE achieves in average a precision of 50% and a recall of up to 100%.