AVA: Supporting Debugging with Failure Interpretations

Several debugging techniques can be used to automatically identify the code fragments or the runtime events likely responsible of a failure. These techniques are useful, but can help reducing the debugging effort only to a given extent. In fact, even when these techniques are successful, software developers still have to invest a lot of effort in understanding if and why something detected as suspicious is really wrong. In this paper we present the tool implementing the AVA technique. AVA, compared to other approaches dedicated to automatic debugging, in addition to automatically identifying the events likely responsible of a failure, generates an explanation about why these events have been considered suspicious. This explanation can be used by developers to quickly discard imprecise outputs and more effectively work on the relevant anomalies.