The Challenge of Helping the Programmer during Debugging

Programmers spend considerable time debugging their systems. They add logging statements and use debuggers to run their systems in a controlled environment all in an attempt to understand what is happening as their program executes. Our hypothesis is that visualization tools can significantly improve the debugging process. A wide variety of tools have been developed for visualizing and understanding the dynamics of program execution. These tools can provide lots of information about executions. However, most tools are not designed to be used with a debugger. What is needed are tools that can work while the programmer is debugging a system and that provide the information the programmer needs to understand and assist the debugging process. We have started to develop such tools within the context of the Code Bubbles development environment. However, there is much room for improvement and we call upon the software visualization community to think about and develop practical tools that will improve the debugging process.