Software debugging accounts for a vast majority of the financial and time costs in software developing and maintenance. Thus, approaches of software fault localization that can help automate the debugging process have become a hot topic in the field of software engineering. Given the great demand for software fault localization, an approach based on the artificial bee colony(ABC) algorithm is proposed to be integrated with other related techniques. In this process, the source program is initially instrumented after analyzing the dependence information. The test case sets are then compiled and run on the instrumented program, and execution results are input to the ABC algorithm. The algorithm can determine the largest fitness value and best food source by calculating the average fitness of the employed bees in the iterative process. The program unit with the highest suspicion score corresponding to the best test case set is regarded as the final fault localization. Experiments are conducted with the TCAS program in the Siemens suite. Results demonstrate that the proposed fault localization method is effective and efficient. The ABC algorithm can efficiently avoid the local optimum, and ensure the validity of the fault location to a larger extent.