Debugging Revisited Toward Understanding the Debugging Needs of Contemporary Software Developers
Authors -
Lucas, Layman;
Madeline, Diep;
Meiyappan, Nagappan;
Janice, Singer;
Robert, Deline and
Gina, Venolia
Venue -
Related Tags -
Abstract -
We know surprisingly little about how professional
developers define debugging and the challenges they face in
industrial environments. To begin exploring professional
debugging challenges and needs, we conducted and analyzed
interviews with 15 professional software engineers at Microsoft.
The goals of this study are: 1) to understand how professional
developers currently use information and tools to debug; 2) to
identify new challenges in debugging in contemporary software
development domains (web services, multithreaded/multicore
programming); and 3) to identify the improvements in debugging
support desired by these professionals that are needed from
research. The interviews were coded to identify the most common
information resources, techniques, challenges, and needs for
debugging as articulated by the developers. The study reveals
several debugging challenges faced by professionals, including: 1)
the interaction of hypothesis instrumentation and software
environment as a source of debugging difficulty; 2) the impact of
log file information on accurate debugging of web services; and
3) the mismatch between the sequential human thought process
and the non-sequential execution of multithreaded environments
as source of difficulty. The interviewees also describe desired
improvements to tools to support debugging, many of which have
been discussed in research but not transitioned to practice.
Preprint -
PDF
BibTex -
@article{Layman2013,
author = {Lucas, Layman and Madeline, Diep and Meiyappan, Nagappan and Janice, Singer and Robert, Deline and Gina, Venolia},
keyword = {Debugging},
title = {Debugging Revisited Toward Understanding the Debugging Needs of Contemporary Software Developers},
type = {workshop}
}