Understanding Failures Through Facts

“Why does my program crash?”—This ever recurring ques-tion of software debugging drives the developer during the analysis of the failure. Complex defects are impossible to automatically identify; this can only be left to human judg-ment. But what we can do is empower the developer to make an informed decision, by helping her understand the failure. To fully comprehend a failure, one may need to con-sider many different aspects such as the range of the input parameters and the program’s structure and runtime be-havior. I propose an approach that gathers a variety of such facts from a given failing execution. To examine the cor-relation of those facts to the failure, it produces additional executions that differ in as few facts as possible. Then the approach creates generalizations and abstractions over the correlating facts. These explain different aspects of the fail-ure and thus help the developer understand and eventually fix the underlying defect