VIDA: Visual interactive debugging

Software debugging is time-consuming and effort-consuming. Although software debugging, especially fault-localization, has been studied for long, few practical debugging tools have been developed and used by the industry. In this paper we present VIDA, a visual interactive debugging tool, which has been integrated with the Eclipse Integrated Development Environment to support a programmer´s debugging process. During the programmer´s conventional debugging process, VIDA continuously recommends break-points for the programmer based on the analysis of execution information and the gathered feedback from the programmer. Moreover, VIDA provides a program outline to help the programmer choose breakpoints and visualizes the static dependency relation to help the programmer make estimation at breakpoints.