相关论文: Causes and Effects in Computer Programs

The programming language Prolog makes declarative programming possible, at least to a substantial extent. Programs may be written and reasoned about in terms of their declarative semantics. All the advantages of declarative programming are…

Debugging is considered as a rigorous but important feature of software engineering process. Since more than a decade, the software engineering research community is exploring different techniques for removal of faults from programs but it…

Quantum computers are becoming more mainstream. As more programmers are starting to look at writing quantum programs, they need to test and debug their code. In this paper, we discuss various use-cases for quantum computers, either…

Many researchers have studied the behaviour of successful developers while debugging desktop software. In this paper, we investigate the embedded-software debugging by intermediate programmers through an exploratory study. The bugs are…

Understanding the root cause of a defect is critical to isolating and repairing buggy behavior. We present Causal Testing, a new method of root-cause analysis that relies on the theory of counterfactual causality to identify a set of…

Data analysis for scientific experiments and enterprises, large-scale simulations, and machine learning tasks all entail the use of complex computational pipelines to reach quantitative and qualitative conclusions. If some of the activities…

This paper introduces a Theory of Troubleshooting that is rooted in cognitive science. This theory helps software developers explain the challenges they face and the project risks that emerge as troubleshooting becomes difficult. We define…

From the standpoint of applied ontology, the problem of understanding and modeling causation has been recently challenged on the premise that causation is real. As a consequence, the following three results were obtained: (1) causation can…

Many dependability techniques expect certain behaviors from the underlying subsystems and fail in chaotic ways if these expectations are not met. Under expected circumstances, however, software tends to work quite well. This paper suggests…

We present an approach to program reasoning which inserts between a program and its verification conditions an additional layer, the denotation of the program expressed in a declarative form. The program is first translated into its…

Understanding the laws that govern a phenomenon is the core of scientific progress. This is especially true when the goal is to model the interplay between different aspects in a causal fashion. Indeed, causal inference itself is…

Determining whether a configurable software system has a performance bug or it was misconfigured is often challenging. While there are numerous debugging techniques that can support developers in this task, there is limited empirical…

Recent advancements in quantum computing software are gradually increasing the scope and size of quantum programs being developed. At the same time, however, these larger programs provide more possibilities for functional errors that are…

Software testing is a critical element of software quality assurance and represents the ultimate review of specification, design and coding. Software testing is the process of testing the functionality and correctness of software by running…

Causal Learning has emerged as a major theme of research in statistics and machine learning in recent years, promising specific computational techniques to apply to datasets that reveal the true nature of cause and effect in a number of…

We propose new definitions of (causal) explanation, using structural equations to model counterfactuals. The definition is based on the notion of actual cause, as defined and motivated in a companion paper. Essentially, an explanation is a…

We propose a new definition of actual cause, using structural equations to model counterfactuals. We show that the definition yields a plausible and elegant account of causation that handles well examples which have caused problems for…

A type debugger interactively detects the expressions that cause type errors. It asks users whether they intend the types of identifiers to be those that the compiler inferred. However, it seems that novice programmers often get in trouble…

In the modern world, we are permanently using, leveraging, interacting with, and relying upon systems of ever higher sophistication, ranging from our cars, recommender systems in e-commerce, and networks when we go online, to integrated…

Many logic programming languages have delay primitives which allow coroutining. This introduces a class of bug symptoms -- computations can flounder when they are intended to succeed or finitely fail. For concurrent logic programs this is…