A Value-Based Diagnosis Model for Java

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 outcome of our approach to the results obtained by using program slicing, a traditional technique from the software debugging community, and a simple dependency-based model for Java.