Failure and Fault Analysis for Software Debugging

Most studies of software failures and faul ts have done little more than classifying failures and faults collected f r o m long-term projects. In this paper, we propose a model t o analyze failures and faults f o r debugging purpose. In the model, w e define ‘ ya ihre modes” and “failure types” t o ident i fy t he existence of program failures and the nature of t he program failures, respectively. T h e goal of this research i s t o achieve a systematic process model t o localize fau l t s in debugging. w e f irst examine properties of t he proposed model f r o m theoretical point of view, t hen use the trityp program as a simple example t o illustrate the possible usage of the model f o r debugging. Further s tudy o n the failure mode, a pilot experiment of applying the proposed model, and the way t o employ heuristics according t o different si tuations f o r fault localization are areas of future work.