Anteater: Interactive Visualization of Program Execution Values in Context

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Faust, Rebecca, Isaacs, Katherine, Bernstein, William Z., Sharp, Michael, Scheidegger, Carlos
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2019
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author Faust, Rebecca
Isaacs, Katherine
Bernstein, William Z.
Sharp, Michael
Scheidegger, Carlos
author_facet Faust, Rebecca
Isaacs, Katherine
Bernstein, William Z.
Sharp, Michael
Scheidegger, Carlos
contents Debugging is famously one the hardest parts in programming. In this paper, we tackle the question: what does a debugging environment look like when we take interactive visualization as a central design principle? We introduce Anteater, an interactive visualization system for tracing and exploring the execution of Python programs. Existing systems often have visualization components built on top of an existing infrastructure. In contrast, Anteater's organization of trace data enables an intermediate representation which can be leveraged to automatically synthesize a variety of visualizations and interactions. These interactive visualizations help with tasks such as discovering important structures in the execution and understanding and debugging unexpected behaviors. To assess the utility of Anteater, we conducted a participant study where programmers completed tasks on their own python programs using Anteater. Finally, we discuss limitations and where further research is needed.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_1907_02872
institution arXiv
publishDate 2019
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Anteater: Interactive Visualization of Program Execution Values in Context
Faust, Rebecca
Isaacs, Katherine
Bernstein, William Z.
Sharp, Michael
Scheidegger, Carlos
Human-Computer Interaction
Software Engineering
Debugging is famously one the hardest parts in programming. In this paper, we tackle the question: what does a debugging environment look like when we take interactive visualization as a central design principle? We introduce Anteater, an interactive visualization system for tracing and exploring the execution of Python programs. Existing systems often have visualization components built on top of an existing infrastructure. In contrast, Anteater's organization of trace data enables an intermediate representation which can be leveraged to automatically synthesize a variety of visualizations and interactions. These interactive visualizations help with tasks such as discovering important structures in the execution and understanding and debugging unexpected behaviors. To assess the utility of Anteater, we conducted a participant study where programmers completed tasks on their own python programs using Anteater. Finally, we discuss limitations and where further research is needed.
title Anteater: Interactive Visualization of Program Execution Values in Context
topic Human-Computer Interaction
Software Engineering
url https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.02872