Locating bugs in java programs-first results of the java diagnosis experiments project

Abstract

This paper describes the use of model-based reasoning for locating bugs in Java programs. Model-based diagnosis is a technology that uses a declarative, generic description of the behavior of the components occurring in a domain to construct a model of the overall system which can then be used at the desired level of abstraction to predict a system’s behavior and derive assumptions about which parts of the system are incorrect. This approach is particularly enticing when applied to software since the model can be constructed from the program automatically. However, the actual choice of models poses interesting challenges. We show a simple model based on dependencies that can be used to diagnose very large programs, and walk through an example debugging session.