Interactive Visualizations of Automatic Debugging Reports

Abstract

Automated debugging techniques, based on statistical analysis of historical test executions data, have recently received considerable attention due to their diagnostic capabilities. However, current automatic debugging tools suffer from a common shortcoming that may affect their adoption and correct use: the lack of effective visualizations of their output. This paper explores the use of interactive visualization techniques applied to automatic debugging results, and integrated in a common development environment (Eclipse), to improve the efficiency of the debugging process. The proposed tool – GZOLTAR– is an Eclipse plug-in that includes an automatic debugging algorithm and generates interactive visualizations of the resulting hierarchical data, with direct links to the IDE's source code editor.