Time-traveling object-centric breakpoints

Abstract

Object-centric breakpoints aim to facilitate the debugging of object-oriented programs by focusing on specific objects. However, their practical application faces limitations. They often produce false positives and require developers to identify objects to debug in a running program, which is sometimes not possible due to non-determinism. Additionally, object-centric breakpoints are difficult to build because, to the best of our knowledge, their implementations have never been abstracted from low-level concerns. The literature describes complex reflective architectures necessary for implementing these breakpoints, and their rare available implementations are language-specific.

In this paper, we introduce Time-Traveling Object-Centric Breakpoints (TTOCBs), a new definition and implementation of object-centric breakpoints based on Time-Traveling Queries (TTQs). TTQs are an extensible time-traveling debugging system that allows developers to explore their program executions back and forth by executing debugging queries. We argue that our query-based implementation helps to overcome the limitations of traditional object-centric breakpoints. We describe how TTOCBs assist developers in searching for objects to debug within their program executions, even in the presence of non-determinism. We illustrate how existing object-centric breakpoints from the literature can be implemented and how new ones can be created in a few steps using the TTQ abstractions and scripting API. To build breakpoints, developers need to familiarize themselves with a short API instead of learning language reflection techniques and libraries. This makes our TTOCBs independent of the underlying TTQs and debugger implementations.

To evaluate our solution, we conducted an initial anecdotal user study on four example scenarios, providing evidence that debugging with TTOCBs requires fewer actions than with traditional object-centric breakpoints. We then discuss the comparison between object-centric breakpoints and TTOCBs in terms of applicability and performance.