Understanding Interactive Debugging with Swarm Debug Infrastructure

1. Understanding Interactive Debugging with
Swarm Debug Infrastructure
Fabio Petrillo ∗† , Zéphyrin Soh † , Foutse Khomh † , Marcelo Pimenta∗ ,
Carla Freitas∗ , Yann-Gaël Guéhéneuc †
∗ Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, RS, Brazil
École Polytechnique de Montréal, QC, Canada
1/##
24th IEEE International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC’16)

2. Is debugging important?
Developers spend major part of their time analysing code by debugging
(33%) [LaToza 2010].
LaToza, T. D., & Myers, B. a. (2010). Developers ask reachability questions. 2010 ACM/IEEE 32nd
International Conference on Software Engineering, 1, 185–194.
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3. if debugging is important to create knowledge about a
software project,
why is this human knowledge lost?

4. Can we collect and share
debugging session information?

5. Our approach
Swarm Debug
Infrastructure

6. Swarm Debug Infrastructure (SDI) is an
open-source infrastructure which allows
practitioners and researchers to collect and share
fine-grained data about developers’ interactive
debugging activities.

7. Infrastructure

8. Architecture

9. Metadata

10. Experimental
Study

11. Does Swarm Debug Infrastructure answer questions about
debugging behaviors?

12. Experiment design
● 10 participants
● Warm-up task
● 3 bug location tasks
● Open source project: JabRef 3.2

13. Results

14. RQ1: How many breakpoints does a developer toggle by
task?
● participants toggled between one or two breakpoints by task

15. RQ1: How many breakpoints does a developer toggle by
task?
● participants toggled between one or two breakpoints by task
RQ2: Do developers follow similar navigation patterns
through method invocations during debugging?
● we observed two distinct debugging navigation patterns:
● fuzzy debugging pattern (several branches)
● straight debugging pattern

16. Fuzzy pattern

18. Straight pattern

20. ● an approach to collect, store and share debugging session information
● provides an infrastructure to:
○ create tools for visualizing context-aware debugging
○ create recommendation systems
○ perform empirical studies
● It is free/open source and open research data
○ https://github.com/SwarmDebugging
○ http://server.swarmdebugging.org/
Swarm Debug Infrastructure (SDI)

21. Do you like work with
these data?

22. Do you like work with
these data?
Go ahead!

23. 23/##
Thank you!
fabio@petrillo.com
Understanding Interactive Debugging with
Swarm Debug Infrastructure
24th IEEE International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC’16)