A Novel Approach for Bug Localization for Exception Handling and Multithreading Through Mutation

Locating bugs in a source code is an overwhelming task and takes a great amount of cost, time and human effort. To locate bugs a developer has to go through thousands of lines of code to zero in on the code area that is creating the unintended output. It is a necessity to create automated systems that can assist the developers with the task of bug fixing by narrowing down to the possible location of the bug, if not locate the exact location. This paper concentrates on the bug localization technique based on the idea of source code mutation. The premises of the approach is that if the source code contains bugs then a mutation of the source code might be a better approximation of the intended code. The paper proposes new and minimal sets of mutation operators for two unexplored aspects of programming: Exception Handling and Multithreading that will create mutations of the source code hoping to get better approximation of the intended code thereby uncovering a bug in Exception Handling or in Multithreading.