Article

Object-centric debugging

Authors:

Alexandre Bergel,

Oscar NierstraszAuthors Info & Claims

ICSE '12: Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Software Engineering

Pages 485 - 495

Published: 02 June 2012 Publication History

Abstract

During the process of developing and maintaining a complex software system, developers pose detailed questions about the runtime behavior of the system. Source code views offer strictly limited insights, so developers often turn to tools like debuggers to inspect and interact with the running system. Unfortunately, traditional debuggers focus on the runtime stack as the key abstraction to support debugging operations, though the questions developers pose often have more to do with objects and their interactions. We propose object-centric debugging as an alternative approach to interacting with a running software system. We show how, by focusing on objects as the key abstraction, natural debugging operations can be defined to answer developer questions related to runtime behavior. We present a running prototype of an object-centric debugger, and demonstrate, with the help of a series of examples, how object-centric debugging offers more effective support for many typical developer tasks than a traditional stack-oriented debugger.

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

ICSE '12: Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Software Engineering

June 2012

1657 pages

ISBN:9781467310673

General Chair:
Martin Glinz,
Program Chairs:
Gail Murphy,
Mauro Pezzè

Sponsors

SIGSOFT: ACM Special Interest Group on Software Engineering

Publisher

IEEE Press

Publication History

Published: 02 June 2012

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ICSE '12

Sponsor:

SIGSOFT

ICSE '12: 34th International Conference on Software Engineering

June 2 - 9, 2012

Zurich, Switzerland

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Overall Acceptance Rate 276 of 1,856 submissions, 15%

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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3359619.3359745
Vaish NKhosla C(2019)Uniform debugging interface for simulatorsProceedings of the Third International Conference on Advanced Informatics for Computing Research10.1145/3339311.3339340(1-7)Online publication date: 15-Jun-2019
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