Empirically analyzing debugging activity is notoriously difficult. In particular, aggregating data (obtained from either observation or event logging) to verify hypotheses on developers' behavior is known to be challenging. Overall, the difficulty of studying debugging activities contributes to the need for more empirical evidence on how practitioners use debuggers. We propose debugging activity blueprint as a visual tool to analyze and navigate through all the events recorded in a programming environment. Our blueprint is a polymetric view representing the interaction between debuggers and other programming tools. Our blueprint highlights the flow of a debugging activity across the tools an IDE offers. An exploratory use case over three participants and two debugging tasks indicates that our blueprint supports a fine-grained analysis of complex debugging scenarios.

Debugging object-oriented programs requires understanding how objects interact with each other and how their state evolves during execution. It is an arduous activity, as there are no methods to support finding objects to debug and explore their interactions. In this paper we present Scopeo, a novel object-centric approach to explore objects and their interactions in object-oriented programs. We evaluate the performance of Scopeo and conclude its applicability to real debugging scenarios. We then open a discussion on the interest of this approach for future research into debugging and program comprehension.