On the relationship between model-based debugging and program slicing

摘要

Program slicing is a general, widely-used, and accepted technique applicable to different software engineering tasks including debugging, whereas model-based diagnosis is an AI technique originally developed for finding faults in physical systems. During the last years it has been shown that model-based diagnosis can be used for software debugging. In this paper we discuss the relationship between debugging using a dependency-based model and program slicing. As a result we obtain that slices of a program in a fault situation are equivalent to conflicts in model-based debugging.