"A Spectrum-Based Approach to Software Fault Localization"

Automated diagnosis techniques help to localize faults that are the root causes of discrepancies between expected and observed behaviour of systems. As such, these techniques are a natural companion to testing efforts, which aim at exposing such discrepancies. In software development, automated diagnosis can reduce the effort spent on manual debugging, which shortens the test-diagnose-repair cycle, and can hence be expected to lead to more reliable systems, and a shorter time-to-market. Outside the software development cycle, diagnosis results can also be used for maintenance and as the basis for (automated) recovery techniques. In this talk we outline the principles of fault diagnosis and specifically focus on fault diagnosis of software when modelling information is only minimal.