Proposal of a Visualizing Method of Data Transitions to Support Debugging for Java Programs
Tetsuro Katayama, Hiroto Nakamura, Yoshihiro Kita, Hisaaki Yamaba, Naonobu Okazaki · Journal of Robotics Networking and Artificial Life · 2014
It takes much time to find the cause of a bug in debugging of programs.Finding the cause of a bug needs to comprehend a flow and data transitions in executing programs.It is difficult to grasp behavior in executing the programs whose behavior is unexpected by a bug.We propose a visualizing method of data transitions to support debugging for Java programs in order to improve efficiency of debugging by supporting to find the cause of a bug.We have implemented TVIS in order to confirm efficiency of the proposed method.The data transitions diagram is the most characteristic function of TVIS which shows the data transitions in executing programs as a table.It can show visually abnormal behavior: no data renewed at all, data abnormally renewed, and so on.Because abnormal behavior is detected in the data transitions diagram at first glance, it is useful for programmers in finding the cause of a bug.This paper shows that the method can support to find the cause of a bug.