A Pragmatic Survey of Automated Debugging

This article proposes a structuring view of the area of automated debugging. Nineteen automated debugging systems are analyzed. Thirteen existing automated debugging techniques are brieey evaluated from a pragmatic point of view. The three underlying strategies are identiied, namely veriication with respect to speciication, checking with respect to language knowledge and ltering with respect to symptom. The veriication strategy compares the actual program with some formal speciication of the intended program. The checking strategy looks for suspect places which do not comply with some explicit knowledge of the programming language. The ltering strategy assumes correct parts of the code which cannot be responsible for the error symptom. Assertion evaluation and algorithmic debugging are the most promising veri-cation techniques. Some intrinsic limitations of the checking strategy makes it only a complementary, though helpful, debugging support. The slicing technique should be included in any debugger.