Using abstract dependences to localize faults from procedural programs

Use of fault localization in control engineering where engineers often employ the procedural programming paradigm. Often control software is safety-critical and thus detection but also localization of bugs is uttermost important. Detecting and locating faults is one of the most important phase of Software Engineering. Many efforts have been taken to improve software development and to prevent faults. But still software faults pose that most challenging problems to software engineers.This article makes use of abstract dependencies between program variables for locating faults in programs. We motivate the underline theory and give experimental results. Our fault localization model is based on previous work that uses the abstract dependencies for fault detection. In this paper we introduce a model for method calls including parameter substitution, global variables and the return statement of methods. The results show that our model is practically applicable in the field of software debugging.