Extending diagnosis to debug programs with exceptions

Abstract

Even with modern software development methodologies, the actual debugging of source code, i.e., location and identification of errors in the program when errant behavior is encountered during testing, remains a crucial part of software development. To apply model-based diagnosis techniques which have long been state of the art in hardware diagnosis, for automatic debugging a model of a given program must be automatically created from the source code. This work describes a model that reflects the sequential execution semantics of the Java language, including exceptions and unstructured control flow, thereby providing unprecedented scope in the application of model-based diagnosis to programs. Notably, this approach omits the strict view of a component representing one statement of earlier work and provides a more flexible mapping from code to model.