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Causes and Effects in Computer Programs
Andreas Zeller

 Lehrstuhl für Softwaretechnik (Prof. Zeller)
Universität des Saarlandes – Informatik
Informatik Campus des Saarlandes
Campus E9 1 (CISPA)
66123 Saarbrücken
E-mail: zeller @ cs.uni-saarland.de
Telefon: +49 681 302-70970

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   Andreas Zeller. Causes and Effects in Computer Programs. Invited Paper, Proc. Fifth Intl. Workshop on Automated and Algorithmic Debugging (AADEBUG 2003), Ghent, Belgium, September 2003.
So, if experimentation can find failure causes automatically, and if deduction can find errors, why don't we just fix all the bugs? The reason is subtle: Just because something is a cause, it need not be an error. If your computer catches a virus from an e-mail, the virus code is the cause of the infection. However, the virus code is not an error—it is perfectly legitimate for e-mail to contain arbitrary content. (Finding "the" Error)

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Abstract

Debugging is commonly understood as finding and fixing the cause of a problem. But what does "cause" mean? How can we find causes? How can we prove that a cause is a cause—or even "the" cause? This paper defines common terms in debugging, highlights the principal techniques, their capabilities and limitations.

Contents

  1. How Failures Come to Be
  2. About Causality
  3. Reasoning About Programs
  4. Finding "the" Error
  5. Conclusion
  6. References
  7. Glossary

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<webmaster@st.cs.uni-saarland.de> · http://www.st.cs.uni-saarland.de/papers/aadebug2003/?lang=de · Stand: 2018-04-05 13:41