Debugging Distributed Systems with Causal Nets

Abstract: Formal methods for deciding the properties of service oriented systems are of paramount importance. However, they may require to master sophisticated techniques that programmers may lack. This issue can be mitigated by providing programmers with tools and techniques that are close to the usual programming practice. Here, we propose to use causal nets to define a few debugging primitives to drive the analysis of system developed with SC (after Signal Calculus), a process calculus featuring event-notification communication. The usage of causal nets per-mits, transparently to the programmer, to build up the causal information of systems along their evolution. A few debugging primitives can be defined in terms of oper-ations on the causal nets. Using the debugging primitives, programmers can query the causal nets in order to reconstruct how the computation evolved.