Mapping breakpoint types: an exploratory study

TL;DR

This study systematically maps and categorizes breakpoint types across IDEs and academic literature, providing a foundational taxonomy to enhance debugging research and practice.

Contribution

It introduces the first comprehensive mapping and taxonomy of breakpoint types across IDEs and academic sources, aiding future debugging research.

Findings

Mapped breakpoint types in nine IDEs and literature

Compiled definitions of various breakpoint types

Developed a taxonomy of breakpoint types

Abstract

Debugging is a relevant task for finding bugs during software development, maintenance, and evolution. During debugging, developers use modern IDE debuggers to analyze variables, step execution, and set breakpoints. Observing IDE debuggers, we find several breakpoint types. However, what are the breakpoint types? The goal of our study is to map the breakpoint types among IDEs and academic literature. Thus, we mapped the gray literature on the documentation of the nine main IDEs used by developers according to the three public rankings. In addition, we performed a systematic mapping of academic literature over 68 articles describing breakpoint types. Finally, we analyzed the developers understanding of the main breakpoint types through a questionnaire. We present three main contributions: (1) the mapping of breakpoint types (IDEs and literature), (2) compiled definitions of breakpoint types, (3) a breakpoint type taxonomy. Our contributions provide the first step to organize breakpoint IDE taxonomy and lexicon, and support further debugging research.