Failure and fault analysis for software debugging

Most studies of software failures and faults have done little more than classify failures and faults collected from long-term projects. The authors propose a model to analyze failures and faults for debugging purposes. In the model, they define "failure modes" and "failure types" to identify the existence of program failures and the nature of the program failures, respectively. The goal of this research is to achieve a systematic process model to localize faults in debugging. They first examine properties of the proposed model from a theoretical point of view, then use the trityp program as a simple example to illustrate the possible usage of the model for debugging. Further study of the failure mode, a pilot experiment of applying the proposed model, and a way to employ heuristics according to different situations for fault localization are areas of future work.