dak@uoregon.uoregon.edu (David Alan Keldsen) (02/16/89)
I'm trying to put together a talk for a seminar here (the subject is
Object-Oriented Programming Systems)...and I'm hoping to find some
information on debugging support in such systems, research issues, and
so on. So far, I've had very little luck in finding any useful
information; it seems that very little research has been devoted to
debugging (in general)--which is surprising in light of the MASSIVE
amount of time that it consumes.
It seems to me that OOPS represent both special opportunities and
special challenges to debugging (and to software engineering in
general). Consider, for example, that the traditional 'waterfall'
methods of software engineering (phases of stepwise refinement of
design and then implementation) give the debugger/maintainer a
reference for how the system is 'supposed to' behave. With incremental
design and implementation, the idea of what the system is supposed to
do is much more difficult to grasp. Support tools such as the
Smalltalk browser, and the various standard debugging primitives in
most systems, assist the debugger in exploring and modifying
behaviors...but where are the tools which give 'the big picture' in
characterizing the behavior (or misbehavior) of objects and classes of
objects? Especially since system state is even more distributed than
usual...
If single objects or classes of objects misbehave, the bugs are
(hopefully) well isolated in the objects themselves rather than
distributed throughout. But then there are the behaviors that are not
captured in single objects...
Do these issues ring any bells for you? If you've seen some
interesting research/projects/products in this area, please drop me a
line at the address in my .signature. If you think it is really of
interest to the newsgroup, follow up. I will summarize and post
replies if there is sufficient interest.
Thanks in advance.
--
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