Proposal of a Visualizing Method of Data Transitions to Support Debugging for Java Programs

Authors
Tetsuro Katayama, Hiroto Nakamura, Yoshihiro Kita, Hisaaki Yamaba, Naonobu Okazaki
Corresponding Author
Tetsuro Katayama
Available Online 15 September 2014.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.2991/jrnal.2014.1.2.3How to use a DOI?
Keywords
programming, program slicing, visualization, debug, dynamic analysis, syntax analysis
Abstract
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.

Copyright
© 2013, the Authors. Published by ALife Robotics Corp. Ltd.
Open Access
This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).