A Study on the Use of IDE Features for Debugging

Abstract

Integrated development environments (IDEs) provide features to help developers both create and understand code. As maintenance and bug repair are time-consuming and costly activities, IDEs have long integrated debugging features to simplify these tasks. In this paper we investigate the impact of using IDE debugger features on different aspects of programming and debugging. Using the data set provided by MSR challenge track, we compared debugging tasks performed with or without the IDE debugger. We find, on average, that developers spend more time and effort on debugging when they use the debugger. Typically, developers start using the debugger early, at the beginning of a debugging session, and that their editing behavior does not appear to significantly change when they are debugging regardless of whether debugging features are in use.