CSC/ECE 517 Fall 2009/wiki1b 1 ch

Debuggers have been around for at least 35 years, but the debuggers in NetBeans and Eclipse took debugging to a new level by integrating it with a large number of facilities for writing code. Describe the advances in debugging during this decade, taking into account (i) the academic literature, (ii) debugging in commercial development environments, and (iii) debugging and open source.

Background

Debuggers are software tools used by software developers to find and eliminate bugs. They allow the developers to examine the code in details, run through them line by line, checking variables' value at a specific point, etc. Debugging tools, such as Eclipse and NetBeans, have have become more sophisticated over the past decade. These IDEs are not only equipped with build in capabilities for debugging, but also serve as platforms for plug-in tools that extend their capabilities.