Marc Khouzam and
T. Kunz.
Single Stepping in Event-Visualization Tools.
To appear in Proceedings of the 1996 CAS Conference.
IBM Canada Ltd. Laboratory, Centre for Advanced Studies.
Toronto, Ont., Canada. November 1996.
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Abstract
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Event-visualization tools are commonly used to facilitate the debugging
of distributed applications. Although these tools provide a graphical
view of distributed executions, they are frequently insufficient for full
debugging purposes. The need for traditional debugging operations is
often overlooked when building these tools. One of the most useful
operations in traditional debuggers is single stepping. However, the
difficulties faced when dealing with partially ordered-executions have
deterred the development of a single-stepping method for concurrent
processes. This paper describes a single-stepping operations suitable
for event-visualization tools. Three different methods for single stepping
are presented: global-step, step-over and step-in.
Abstraction techniques are commonly used to reduce the overwhelming
amount of detail presented to the user. Accordingly, single stepping in
the presence of abstraction is considered. The operations defined in
this paper have been implemented in POET, a Partial Order Event Tracer,
and examples of the resulting visualizations are given.
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