Swarm Debugging: towards a shared debugging knowledge

Debugging is a tedious and time-consuming task since it is a methodical process of finding causes and reducing the number of errors. During debugging sessions, developers run a software project, traversing method invocations, setting breakpoints, stopping or restarting executions. In these sessions, developers explore some project areas and create knowledge about them. Unfortunately, when these sessions finish, this knowledge is lost, and developers cannot use it in other debugging sessions or sharing it with collaborators. In this paper, we present Swarm Debugging, a new approach for visualizing and sharing information obtained from debugging sessions. Swarm Debugging provides interactive and real-time visualizations, and several searching tools. We present a running prototype and show how our approach offers more useful support for many typical development tasks than a traditional debugger tool. Through usage scenarios, we demonstrate that our approach can aid developers to decrease the required time for deciding where to toggle a breakpoint and locate bug causes.