• Debugging is a major component that ensures proper functioning of the program. The existing debuggers and fault localization systems are restricted only to programs and do not consider any knowledge apart from the programs.
• Applications are usually developed in a programming language and are to be operated in a particular domain. Typically, debuggers find it difficult to efficiently consider the corresponding domain-knowledge. Additionally, standardized procedures for instrumenting programs and generating execution-traces are challenges faced while performing a validation task.
• Further, the thoughts of a programmer, and the reason and explanations for the code written by the developers are not documented in existing debugging methods. There are separate formal representations available to the programs, execution of the programs and the domain-knowledge. However, these representations are not inter-operative with each other.
• Thus, there is need for a system and method that automatically identifying bugs and generating explanations of the identified bugs.

The present invention provides a method for automatically identifying bugs and a portion of a code responsible for bugs in a program.

1. The method integrates domain-trace and domain-ontology to identify bugs. A domain-ontology-based Program Assertion (DOPA) framework (Fig.1) is configured to integrate formal representations available to the program, execution of the program, and domain-knowledge, thereby making these representations inter-operative to identify bugs.

2. The DOPA framework instruments a program provided by a user, wherein execution-trace file from the instrumented program is computed and stored during run-time using a Resource Description Framework (RDF). Fig. 2.
3. The domain-ontology (Fig.4) is created by the user and subsequently, a domain-trace is generated. Further, the domain-trace and the domain-ontology are integrated and fed inside a reasoner to identify the bugs in the program.
4. Subsequently, the bugs and individuals of the bugs are identified. Thereafter, explanations of the identified bugs are generated using items of execution-trace and domain-ontology. (Fig. 3)
5. Subsequently, the identified bugs and the identified explanations related to the bugs are presented to the user. (refer Fig.5)