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Software debugging is an extremely difficult cognitive process requiring comprehension of overall application behavior along with detailed understanding of specific application components. Typical debuggers provide inadequate support for this process, focusing primarily on the details accessible through source code. To overcome this deficiency, we link dynamic program execution state to a Unified Modeling Language (UML) object diagram. We enhance the standard UML diagram with focus + context, graph layout, and color encoding techniques that organize and present objects and events in a manner that facilitates analysis of system behavior. We support debugging using high level abstractions commonly used in system design, while maintaining access to low level details with an interactive display.
Jacobs et al. (Wed,) studied this question.