Toward a Richer Language for Describing Software Errors

Abstract

Several approaches to the meaning and uses of errors in software development are discussed. An experiment involving a strong type-checking language, CLU, is described, and the results discussed in terms of the state of the art language for bug description. This method of bug description is found to be lacking sufficient detail to model the progress of software through its entire lifetime. A new method of bug description is proposed, which can describe bug types encountered not only in the current experiment but also in previous experiments. It is expected that this method is robust enough to be independent of the various factors of a software project that influence the realms in which bugs will occur.