Research on formal description of data flow software faults

Software plays an important part in our society. The occurrence of software fault may lead to serious disaster. Data flow software fault is a kind of important software fault. In this paper, the properties of data dependency relationship are studied, the formal definitions of some data flow software faults, such as using undefined variable, nonused variable since definition, and redefining nonused variable since definition are given, the corresponding detecting methods are proposed, and some sample data flow software faults are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.