Software Crash Diagnosis based on Program Slicing over Software Component

[[abstract]]Software crash occurs frequently in our daily life due to poor programming of software. However, when users encounter software crash, an user’s choices are limited. When software crashed, the only choice is to terminate the program. Nevertheless, this choice is not helpful if the same problem occurs again. This thesis propose an idea to diagnose the software after it crashed and display the diagnosis through a component diagram showing that which component would be the major culprit for such a crash. Users can search the internet to look for components with identical functions to replace the problematic components. This concept is widely used in other engineering fields. In other engineering fields, many automatic diagnosis systems have been developed to identify problems quickly. These problematic parts can then be replaced. This thesis proposes to utilizing the trouble shooting concepts in other engineering fields and applying it to software crash. The causes of software crash are varied and complicated. Therefore, we propose a framework that does not use one algorithm to diagnose the crash. The framework contains a rule-based inference engine. to read a crash analysis profile for each kind of crash. It allows us to tune or extend the precision of the analysis continuously. The major analysis technique we use is program slicing. Finally, we demonstrate some case studies in Java programs.