Visual Steering for Program Debugging

Recent trends in the software industry have shown that the number of software development projects and their increasing complexity will continue to increase the demand for skilled programmers. However, debugging technology has not kept pace and valuable programmer resources are being wasted in debugging cycles. Correcting this trend requires innovative approaches to assisting programmers during the debugging cycle to make them more productive both time-wise and with respect to how thoroughly the application is tested and debugged. We have investigated techniques which allow programmers to visually steer an application. Through these new mechanisms, programmer’s can identify and locate problems without the need for revisiting the code (as is done in typical debugging cycles). Through steering the programmer can change the application environment to more thoroughly understand and test the algorithm.