Empirically Evaluating the Impact of Object-Centric Breakpoints on the Debugging of Object-Oriented Programs

Published in Foundation of Software Engineering (FSE), 2025

Arxiv, Paper, Replication Package

ABSTRACT

Context

Debugging consists in understanding the behavior of a program to identify and correct its defects. Breakpoints are the most commonly used debugging tool and aim to facilitate the debugging process by allowing developers to interrupt a program’s execution at a source code location of their choice and inspect the state of the program. Researchers suggest that in systems developed using object-oriented programming (OOP), traditional breakpoints may be a not effective method for debugging.