Visual differential debugging in the domain-specific visual programming languages
Alexander Penev, Martin Vassilev · 2020
As complex software evolves and becomes increasingly more feature complete, it introduces challenges when error detection is required. Finding errors is time consuming because of the complicated control flow graphs and data flows of the underlying complex systems. Identifying the cause of software faults is essential and well known process but in the context of complex systems it is not a trivial task. Developing features and improvements often results in introducing new faults known as software regressions. This means there is a prior version of the application running fine and recent version which is doing something unexpected. The developer could use a tool that loads and executes the two versions in parallel for comparing for differences. Some of the differences are not semantic and could be ignored. This paper provides a prototype for a visual differential debugger with a semantic layer capable of guiding the developer to the possible root of the fault.