Fault Investigation and Trial

Locating bugs is one of the most time-consuming tasks in debugging. Though external resources, such as explicit knowledge bases or formal specifications, can reduce the debugging time, this information either may not be readily available or may be too limited for real-world software. So in general, most debuggers try to reduce the time by providing analysis tools for the programmer to reduce the search space for bugs and to guess at the bug type, location, or both. We review the current state-of-the-art in debugging and point out three shortcomings that deserve more attention. First, the programmer has to perform the analysis and keep track of the results himself while he tries to locate faults. Second, the programmer needs (but lacks) automated decision support to help him evaluate program behavior as he tries to reduce the search space for bugs. Third, the debuggers that support fault location guessing do not point out the statements most likely to be faulty. Our objective is to r...