Issues in testing fault hypotheses

Due to its natural incompleteness, a fault hypothesis generator is always considered to produce inconsistent fault hypotheses. In this paper, some notions on testing generated fault hypotheses are described. In order to discard inconsistent fault hypotheses, a technique classifying types of them and pruning them based on the types is proposed. The technique divides fault hypotheses into three types: pseudo fault hypotheses, contradicting fault hypotheses, and candidate faults. Experiments on testing fault hypotheses by pruning the pseudo and contradicting fault hypotheses have been done, and the results have shown that by doing so, inconsistent fault hypotheses can be gotten rid of considerably. Furthermore, notions to deal with candidate faults are presented as well.