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Testing is a key activity of software development and maintenance that determines the level of reliability. Traceability is the ability to describe and follow the life of software artifacts, and has been promoted as a means for supporting various activities, most importantly testing. Traceability information facilitates the testing and debugging of complex software by modeling the dependencies between code and tests. Actively supplementing traceability to testing enables rectifying defects more reliably and efficiently. Despite its importance, the development of test-to-code traceability has not been sufficiently addressed in the literature, and even worse there is currently no organized review of traceability studies in this field. In this work, we have investigated the main conferences, workshops, and journals of the requirements engineering, testing, and reliability, and identified those contributions that refer to traceability topics. From that starting point, we characterized and analyzed the chosen contributions against three research questions by utilizing a comparative framework including nine criteria. As a result, our study arrives to some interesting points, and outlines a number of potential research directions. This, in turn, can pave the way for facilitating and empowering traceability research in this domain to assist software engineers and testers in test management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An important research area of Spectrum-Based Fault Localization (SBFL) is the effectiveness of risk evaluation formulas. Most previous studies have adopted an empirical approach, which can hardly be considered as sufficiently comprehensive because of the huge number of combinations of various factors in SBFL. Though some studies aimed at overcoming the limitations of the empirical approach, none of them has provided a completely satisfactory solution. Therefore, we provide a theoretical investigation on the effectiveness of risk evaluation formulas. We define two types of relations between formulas, namely, equivalent and better. To identify the relations between formulas, we develop an innovative framework for the theoretical investigation. Our framework is based on the concept that the determinant for the effectiveness of a formula is the number of statements with risk values higher than the risk value of the faulty statement. We group all program statements into three disjoint sets with risk values higher than, equal to, and lower than the risk value of the faulty statement, respectively. For different formulas, the sizes of their sets are compared using the notion of subset. We use this framework to identify the maximal formulas which should be the only formulas to be used in SBFL. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on an computer processor, Bugnet which helps the software developers to deterministically replay and debug an application while executing an computer program. The article author says that the difficult part of debugging is reproducing the bugs at a customer's site because it relys on core dumps which contain the final state of the system before the crash. The article authors' say that they propose the BugNet architecture to assist program developers to continuously record a program's execution as it runs. The Deterministic Replay Debugging technique helps to replay the exact same sequence of instructions that led up to the crash. The processor Bugnet continuously records a program's execution without interfering with the execution of the monitored program. The BugNet writes the logs to a fixed-sized buffer allocated in main memory so that software developers can then use these logs at the time of crash to deterministically replay the last part of execution as many times as required to fix the bug.