Associate Professor of Informatics James Jones recently received the Most Influential Paper award at the 34th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2019). The award recognizes the most influential ASE paper for the past 15 years, and this year’s committee selected “Empirical Evaluation of the Tarantula Automatic Fault-Localization Technique,” by Jones and the late Mary Jean Harrold. Written in 2005, it is the most cited paper of all time for the ASE conference, and according to Google Scholar, it has more than 1,000 citations.

This paper is largely responsible for introducing and popularizing the field of work that is now called Spectra-based Fault Localization. The main contribution of this paper and work is to analyze correlations between execution information that were gathered in white-box testing practices, and the pass/fail status of the test cases that produced them. Doing so can point to locations in the software’s code that are likely to contain the bugs that caused the testing failures, and thus can provide automated debugging assistance to software developers.

— Shani Murray