Glyph-based Visualizations for Debugging Concurrent Java Programs

Due to non-deterministic behavior and thread interleaving of concurrent programs, the debugging of concurrency and performance issues is a rather difficult and often tedious task. The way source code is visually presented in traditional source-code editors does not convey much information on whether the code is executed concurrently or in parallel in the first place. The main goal of this research project is to develop debugging approaches to facilitate the understanding of concurrent programs. In particular, the project focuses on the design and empirical evaluation of interactive, glyph-based visualizations embedded in the program text next to the related source-code artifact. The debugging approaches are implemented in tools that are integrated as plugins into widely used IDEs. For this purpose, a framework called CodeSparks was developed, which makes the creation of such plugins very simple.