What question did this study set out to answer?

This research aims to enhance the debugging process by establishing a clearer link between program code and its execution behavior.

January 1, 1995

Bridging the gulf between code and behavior in programming

Key Points

This research aims to enhance the debugging process by establishing a clearer link between program code and its execution behavior.
Developed ZStep 94, a program debugging environment
Implemented animated views of program execution
Introduced features for incremental history tracking and flexible playback controls.
ZStep 94 significantly reduced debugging time (exact metrics not provided)
Improved understanding of program execution correlation, leading to fewer errors reported by users.

Abstract

Program debugging can be an expensive, complex and frustrating process. Conventional programming environments provide little explicit support for the cognitive tasks of diagnosis and visualization faced by the programmer. ZStep 94 is a program debugging environment designed to help the programmer understand the correspondence between static program code and dynamic program execution. Some of ZStep 94s innovations include: • An animated view of program execution, using the very same display used to edit the source code • A window that displays values which follows the steppers focus • An incrementally-generated complete history of program execution and output • quot;Video recorder quot; controls to run the program in forward and reverse directions and control the level of detail displayed • One-click access from graphical objects to the code that

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