Slicer4D: A Slicing-based Debugger for Java

Debugging software failures often demands significant time and effort. Program slicing is a technique that can help developers fast track the debugging process by allowing them to focus only on the code relevant to the failure. However, despite the effectiveness of slicing, these techniques are not integrated into modern IDEs. Instead, most, if not all, current slicing tools are launched from the command line and produce log files as output. Developers thus have to switch between the IDE and command line tools, manually correlating the log file results with their source code, which hinders the adoption of the slicing-based debugging approaches in practice.To address this challenge, we developed a plugin extending the debugger of IntelliJ IDEA – one of the most popular IDEs – with slicing capabilities. We named our slicing-based debugger extension Slicer4D. Slicer4D offers a user-friendly interface for developers to perform dynamic slicing and further enhances the debugging experience by focusing the developers’ attention only on the parts of the code relevant to the failure. Additionally, Slicer4D is designed in an extensible way, to support integration of a variety of slicing techniques. We hope our tool will pave the way to enhancing developer productivity by seamlessly incorporating dynamic slicing into a familiar development environment.Tool implementation and evaluation package is online [16].