An approach for bug localization in models using two levels: model and metamodel

Bug localization is a common task in software engineering, especially when maintaining and evolving software products. This paper introduces a bug localization approach that, in contrast to existing source code approaches, takes advantage of domain information found in the model and the metamodel. Throughout this paper, we present an approach for bug localization in models (BLiM2) that applies the source code ideas for bug localization (textual similarity to the bug description and the Defect Localization Principle) and takes advantage of the domain information from the model and the metamodel. We evaluated our approach in BSH, a real-world industrial case study in the induction hob domain measuring the results in terms of recall, precision, the combination of both the F-measure and the Matthews correlation coefficient. Our study shows that our BLiM2 approach, which combines information from the model and the metamodel for the textual similarity and differentiates between the timespan from the model and metamodel, provides the best results in this work. We also performed a statistical analysis to provide evidence of the significance of the results. The values obtained show that there exist significant differences in the performance of the best BLiM2 approach with the approach used by our industrial partner. Finally, the effect size statistics reveals that the best BLiM2 approach obtains better results in the 78% of the times in the worst case.