Marcelo Soares Pimenta

Guilherme Lacerda, Fabio Petrillo, Marcelo Pimenta

In Software Engineering, some of the most critical activities are maintenance and evolution. However, to perform both with quality, minimizing impacts and risks, developers need to analyze and identify where the main problems come from previously. In this paper, we introduce DR-Tools Suite, a set of lightweight open-source tools that analyze and calculate source code metrics, allowing developers to visualize the results in different formats and graphs. Also, we define a set of heuristics to help the code analysis. We conducted two case studies (one academic and one industrial) to collect feedback on the tools suite, on how we will evolve the tools, as well as insights to develop new tools that support developers in their daily work.

Fabio Petrillo, Yann-Gaël Guéhéneuc, Marcelo Pimenta et al.

One of the most important tasks in software maintenance is debugging. To start an interactive debugging session, developers usually set breakpoints in an integrated development environment and navigate through different paths in their debuggers. We started our work by asking} what debugging information is useful to share among developers and study two pieces of information: breakpoints (and their locations) and sessions (debugging paths). To answer our question, we introduce the Swarm Debugging concept to frame the sharing of debugging information, the Swarm Debugging Infrastructure (SDI) with which practitioners and researchers can collect and share data about developers' interactive debugging sessions, and the Swarm Debugging Global View (GV) to display debugging paths. Using the SDI, we conducted a large study with professional developers to understand how developers set breakpoints. Using the GV, we also analyzed professional developers in two studies and collected data about their debugging sessions. Our observations and the answers to our research questions suggest that sharing and visualizing debugging data can support debugging activities.