Max-CSP Approach for Software Diagnosis

Abstract

In software development is essential to have tools for the software diagnosis to help the programmers and development engineers to locate the bugs. In this paper, we propose a new approach that identifies the possible bugs and detect why the program does not satisfy the specified result. A typical diagnosis problem is built starting from the structure and semantics of the original source code and the precondition and postcondition formal specifications. When we apply a determined test case to a program and this program fails, then we can use our methodology in order to obtain automatically the sentence or the set of sentences that contains the bug. The originality of our methodology is due to the use of a constraint-based model for software and Max-CSP techniques to obtain the minimal diagnosis and to avoid explicitly to build the functional dependency graph.