Introduction to the special issue on program debugging

Software finds itself in virtually every system or infrastructure today. In particular, it is extensively applied to critical systems in such major areas as aeronautics, medicine, engineering, transportation, power supply, and business and finance. This trend leads to much more demanding standards in software quality because even a small software fault may result in huge losses. For example, the National Institute of Standards and Technology estimated that software failures cost the United States 0.6 percent of its GDP 1 , or $112 billion according to the latest World Bank statistics 2 .