Modeling Java Programs for Diagnosis

A key advantage of model-based diagnosis is the ability to use a generic model for the production of system descriptions that can be used to derive diagnoses for differently structured individual systems from a domain. This advantage is nowhere more apparent than in the software error diagnosis (or debugging) area, where given a model, system descriptions can be automatically derived from source code. However, effective models for diagnosing programs have so far been limited to special-purpose languages. We describe a value-based model for Java programs that enables us to explicitly deal with imperative program execution (including loop execution), and compare the results to those obtained by using program slicing, a traditional technique from the software debugging community, and a simple dependency-based model for Java.