BPGen: an automated breakpoint generator for debugging

  • Authors:

  • Cheng Zhang;Dacong Yan;Jianjun Zhao;Yuting Chen;Shengqian Yang

  • Affiliations:

  • Shanghai Jiao Tong University;The Ohio State University;Shanghai Jiao Tong University;Shanghai Jiao Tong University;Shanghai Jiao Tong University

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 32nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering - Volume 2
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

During debugging processes, breakpoints are frequently used to inspect and understand runtime behaviors of programs. Although most development environments offer convenient breakpoint facilities, the use of these environments usually requires considerable human efforts in order to generate useful breakpoints. Before setting breakpoints or typing breakpoint conditions, developers usually have to make some judgements and hypotheses on the basis of their observations and experience. To reduce this kind of efforts we present a tool, named BPGen, to automatically generate breakpoints for debugging. BPGen uses three well-known dynamic fault localization techniques in tandem to identify suspicious program statements and states, through which both conditional and unconditional breakpoints are generated. BPGen is implemented as an Eclipse plugin for supplementing the existing Eclipse JDT debugger.