It's no surprise that this one pops up often in Mainframe Interview Questions. The faulty data associated with an uninitialized numeric item is the root cause of the SOC-7 error more often than any other factor. Through the execution of certain settings, such as the use of assembly languages to invoke operating system services, we are able to get dumps of run-time abends. With the help of these dumps, we are able to determine the precise place of the instruction at which the abend occurred.   With the help of this, we are able to check the XREF output that lists the compilation and get the line number as well as the verb of the source code of the instruction fault offset. We can get runtime dumps by declaring datasets in JCL as Sysabout, for instance, and then capturing them.   In addition to that, we are able to make advantage of the setups' included debugging capabilities. When none of the approaches seem to be working, the next step is to pinpoint the precise site of the problem by relying on sound judgement and an awareness of how the system was designed.