skip to main content
10.1145/1370114.1370132acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesicseConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Source-level debugging with the whyline

Published: 13 May 2008 Publication History

Abstract

The visualizations of the Whyline are presented, which focus on supporting the exploration a source code and how it executes. The visualization is concise, simple to navigate, and mimics syntactic features of its target programming language for consistency. Two studies showed that users with the visualization completed a debugging task twice as fast as users without the visualization, partly due to features of the visualization. Applications of the visualizations to tasks other than debugging are discussed.

References

[1]
Cherubini, M., Venolia, G., DeLine, R. and Ko. A. J. (2007). Let's Go to the Whiteboard: How and Why Software Developers Draw Code. ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), April 28-May 3, 557--566.
[2]
Hundhausen, C. D., & Brown, J. L. (2007). What You See Is What You Code: A 'Live' Algorithm Development and Visualization Environment for Novice Learners. Journal of Visual Languages and Computing 18(1), pp. 22--47.
[3]
Ko, A. J. & Myers, B. A. (2004). Designing the Whyline: A Debugging Interface for Asking Questions About Program Failures. ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Vienna, Austria, April 24-29, 151--158.
[4]
Ko, A. J. & Myers, B. A. (2008). Debugging Reinvented: Asking and Answering Why and Why Not Questions about Program Behavior. Submitted for publication.
[5]
Ko. A. J., Myers, B. A., Coblenz, M. & Aung, H. H. (2006). An Exploratory Study of How Developers Seek, Relate, and Collect Relevant Information during Software Maintenance Tasks. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 32(12), 971--987.
[6]
Lewis B. (2003). Debugging backwards in time, International Workshop on Automated Debugging, 225--235.
[7]
Reiss, S. P. (2007). Visual Representations of Executing Programs. Journal of Visual Languages & Computing, 18(2), 126--148.
[8]
Tassey, G. (2002). The economic impacts of inadequate infrastructure for software testing. National Institute of Standards and Technology, RTI Project Number 7007.011, 2002.

Cited By

View all
  • (2023)DeepDebugger: An Interactive Time-Travelling Debugging Approach for Deep ClassifiersProceedings of the 31st ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3611643.3616252(973-985)Online publication date: 30-Nov-2023
  • (2023)Too Simple? Notions of Task Complexity used in Maintenance-based Studies of Programming Tools2023 IEEE/ACM 31st International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC)10.1109/ICPC58990.2023.00040(254-265)Online publication date: May-2023

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
CHASE '08: Proceedings of the 2008 international workshop on Cooperative and human aspects of software engineering
May 2008
120 pages
ISBN:9781605580395
DOI:10.1145/1370114
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 13 May 2008

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. debugging
  2. visualization
  3. whyline

Qualifiers

  • Research-article

Conference

ICSE '08
Sponsor:

Acceptance Rates

CHASE '08 Paper Acceptance Rate 28 of 34 submissions, 82%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 47 of 70 submissions, 67%

Upcoming Conference

ICSE 2025

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)12
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0
Reflects downloads up to 20 Feb 2025

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all
  • (2023)DeepDebugger: An Interactive Time-Travelling Debugging Approach for Deep ClassifiersProceedings of the 31st ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3611643.3616252(973-985)Online publication date: 30-Nov-2023
  • (2023)Too Simple? Notions of Task Complexity used in Maintenance-based Studies of Programming Tools2023 IEEE/ACM 31st International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC)10.1109/ICPC58990.2023.00040(254-265)Online publication date: May-2023

View Options

Login options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Figures

Tables

Media

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media