Visualising concurrent programs with dynamic dependence graphs

Abstract

Atropos is a software tool for visualising concurrent program executions intended to help students debug concurrent programs and learn how concurrency works. Atropos supports a slicing debugging strategy by providing a visualisation of dynamic dependence graphs that can be explored to trace the chain of events backwards from a symptom to its cause. In this paper, we present the reasoning behind the design of Atropos and summarise how we evaluated it with students.