Automated and Algorithmic Debugging

Debugging has always been a costly part of software development, and many attempts have been made to provide automatic computer support for this task.Automated debugging has seen major develoments over the last decade. Onesuccessful development is algorithmic debugging, which originated in logic programming but was later generalized to concurrent, imperative, and lazy functional languages. Important advances have also been made in knowledge-based program debugging, and in approaches to automated debugging based on static and dynamic program slicing based on dataflow and dependence analysis technology. This is the first collected volume of papers on automated debugging and presents latest developments, tutorial papers, and surveys.

Autorentext
Peter Fritzson, PHD, is a professor and Director of the Programming Environment Laboratory (PELAB) at the Department of Computer and Information Science, Linköping University, Sweden. He currently holds the position of president of MathCore Engineering AB; chairman of the Scandinavian Simulation Society; secretary of the European sumulation organisation, EuroSim; and vice chairman of the Modelica Association, an organization he helped to establish. Professor Fritzson has published ten books and over a hundred scientific papers.

Inhalt
A pragmatic survey of automated debugging.- Usability criteria for automated debugging systems.- The notions of symptom and error in declarative diagnosis of logic programs.- Debugging by diagnosing assumptions.- Debugging logic programs using specifications.- Model-based diagnosis meets error diagnosis in logic programs.- Towards declarative debugging of concurrent constraint programs.- Hierarchy in testing distributed programs.- Lazy algorithmic debugging: Ideas for practical implementation.- The location of errors in functional programs.- A generalised query minimisation for program debugging.- What's in a trace: The box model revisited.- Declarative debugging of abstract data types in Gödel.- Slicing programs with arbitrary control-flow.- Slicing concurrent programs.- Animators for generated programming environments.- Visualization as debugging: Understanding/debugging the Warren Abstract Machine.- Graphical user interfaces for algorithmic debugging.- Towards a plan calculus based intelligent debugging system.- Trace-based debugging.- Identifying faulty modifications in software maintenance.- The application of formal specifications to software documentation and debugging.- Automatic diagnosis of VLSI digital circuits using algorithmic debugging.