Using Object-Sequence Diagrams for Debugging
Ole Lehrmann Madsen · 2023
Programming languages in general have mechanisms for describing the structure of a program and computational processes to be generated during program execution. Modeling languages like UML also have such mechanisms. In addition, UML has mechanisms for describing required properties of a system using e.g. objects diagrams, and sequence diagrams, during the design process. In this paper, we propose to include such language mechanisms also for programming with the purpose of observing program executions. We present a combination of sequence diagrams and object diagrams called object sequence diagrams (OSDs). We present an OSD-based debugger that has the same functionality as a traditional debugger, but method invocations are shown in sequence diagrams. The debugger supports showing the history of method invocations and supports debugging at different levels of the program structure, by hiding method invocations within nested modules.