Single stepping in event-visualization tools
Marc Khouzam, Thomas Kunz · 1996
Event visualization tools are commonly used to facilitate the debugging of distributed applications. Although these tools provide a graphical view of distributed executions, they are frequently insufficient for full debugging purposes. The need for traditional debugging operations is often overlooked when building these tools. One of the most useful operations in traditional debuggers is single stepping. However, the difficulties faced when dealing with partially ordered-executions have deterred the development of a single-stepping method for concurrent processes. This paper describes a single-stepping operations suitable for eventvisualization tools. Three different methods for single stepping are presented: global-step, step-over and step-in. Abstraction techniques are commonly used to reduce the overwhelming amount of detail presented to the user. Accordingly, single stepping in the presence of abstraction is considered. The operations defined in this paper have been implemented in ...