PhD Qualifying Examination


"A Survey on Automatic Program Debugging"

Mr. Xinming Wang


Abstract:

Program debugging is about how to locate and remove the consequence of
faults in programs. This survey is divided into two parts: automatic fault
localization and automatic program repairing. The first part reviews
various techniques for automatic fault localization, and summarizes them
into two categories, namely model-based ap-proach and experiential
approach. The former treats an erroneous program as a white box and infer
the faulty locations. The later treats the program as a black box and
locate faults by heuristic rules derived from observations. Along these
two dimensions, recent research works are categorized and compared. The
strength and limitation of these works are compared using concrete
examples.

The second part of this survey discusses automatic program repairing,
which is a problem closely related to automatic fault localization.
Existing algorithms are mostly an extension of model-based fault
localization. The survey will also present our pre-liminary research
efforts on program repairing.


Date:     		Tuesday, 30 January 2007

Time:                   2:00p.m.-4:00p.m.

Venue:                  Room 3304
			lifts 17-18

Committee Members:      Dr. Shing Chi Cheung (Supervisor)
			Dr. Zonghua Gu (Chairperson)
			Dr. Mordecai Golin
			Prof. Vincent Shen


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