Abstract
This paper provides techniques for aiding developers’ task of familiarizing themselves with the context of a fault. Many fault-localization techniques present the software developer with a subset of the program to inspect in order to aid in the search for faults that cause failures. However, typically, these techniques do not describe how the components of the subset relate to each other in a way that enables the developer to understand how these components interact to cause failures. These techniques also do not describe how the subset relates to the rest of the program in a way that enables the developer to understand the context of the subset. In this paper, we present techniques for providing static and dynamic relations among program elements that can be used as the basis for the exploration of a program when attempting to understand the nature of faults.
