Petrillo, Fabio, Guéhéneuc, Yann-Gaël, Pimenta, Marcelo, Freitas, Carla Dal Sasso and Khomh, Foutse (2019) Swarm Debugging: the Collective Intelligence on Interactive Debugging. Journal of Systems and Software . ISSN 01641212 (In Press)
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Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2019.04.028
Abstract
One of the most important tasks in software maintenance is debugging. To start an interactive debugging session, developers usually set breakpoints in an integrated development environment and navigate through different paths in their debuggers. We started our work by asking what debugging information is useful to share among developers and study two pieces of information: breakpoints (and their locations) and sessions (debugging paths). To answer our question, we introduce the Swarm Debugging concept to frame the sharing of debugging information, the Swarm Debugging Infrastructure (SDI) with which practitioners and researchers can collect and share data about developers’ interactive debugging sessions, and the Swarm Debugging Global View (GV) to display debugging paths. Using the SDI, we conducted a large study with professional developers to understand how developers set breakpoints. Using the GV, we also analyzed professional developers in two studies and collected data about their debugging sessions. Our observations and the answers to our research questions suggest that sharing and visualizing debugging data can support debugging activities.
| Divisions: | Concordia University > Gina Cody School of Engineering and Computer Science > Computer Science and Software Engineering |
|---|---|
| Item Type: | Article |
| Refereed: | Yes |
| Authors: | Petrillo, Fabio and Guéhéneuc, Yann-Gaël and Pimenta, Marcelo and Freitas, Carla Dal Sasso and Khomh, Foutse |
| Journal or Publication: | Journal of Systems and Software |
| Date: | 9 April 2019 |
| Funders: |
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| Digital Object Identifier (DOI): | 10.1016/j.jss.2019.04.028 |
| Keywords: | Debugging; Swarm debugging; Software visualization; Empirical studies; Distributed systems; Information foraging |
| ID Code: | 985267 |
| Deposited By: | Monique Lane |
| Deposited On: | 18 Apr 2019 19:40 |
| Last Modified: | 09 Apr 2021 01:01 |
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