Event abstraction for debugging distributed programs

The author presents the first analytical study of event abstraction for debugging distributed programs. The results of the study give a better understanding of the impact of event abstraction on event precedences. It shows that a higher-level behavior model provides a correct picture of the precedence relation if and only if all events in the behavior model are contractions. Also, it is shown that most event abstraction systems indeed preserve event precedence since they only support simple contraction. This study not only provides guidelines for developing an abstraction-based distributed debugging system, but also has wider implications in system specification language, programming languages and operating systems