A review of automated debugging systems: knowledge, strategies and techniques

  • Authors:

  • M. Ducassé;A.-M. Emde

  • Affiliations:

  • ECRC, W. Germany;ECRC, W. Germany

  • Venue:
  • ICSE '88 Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Software engineering
  • Year:
  • 1988

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Abstract

Our review is based on descriptions of 18 existing automated systems on program debugging and of a dozen cognitive studies on debugging. We propose a classification of debugging knowledge, and a description of the corresponding knowledge representation in the systems. Then we propose a classification of global debugging strategies used in the systems, and a description of the corresponding techniques. We assess the identified strategies from a real world program development point of view.The knowledge types we have identified are 1) knowledge of the intended program, 2) knowledge of the actual program, 3) understanding of the programming language, 4) general programming expertise, 5) knowledge of the application domain, 6) knowledge of bugs, 7) knowledge on debugging methods.The strategies we have identified are 1) filtering, 2) checking computational equivalence of intended program and actual one, 3) checking the well-formedness of actual program and 4) recognizing stereotyped errors.