OCRE: Lowering the cost of debugging with the first generation of object-centric debuggers – OCRE

Debugging is difficult and costly. Object-centric debugging is a young technique arguing that focusing the scope of debugging on specific objects considerably eases the tracking and the understanding of hard bugs in Object-Oriented Programs (OOP).
But it lacks fundamental bricks to be applicable in practice. Therefore, it has never been empirically evaluated.

The objectives of the OCRE project are to study the fundamental and practical limits that hinder the implementation, the evaluation, and the adoption of object-centric debugging.
We propose to build the first generation of object-centric debuggers, in order to identify and evaluate its real benefits to OOP debugging.
We argue that these debuggers have the potential to drastically lower the cost (time and effort) of tracking and understanding hard bugs in OOP.

We will:
(1) define how to identify objects to debug;
(2) define and study object-centric concurrent tools for the debugging of concurrency;
(3) evaluate the technique through large-scale empirical evaluations and industrial use-cases.
We will build advanced debuggers prototypes that will be transferable to the open-source and the industrial world.
This work will open the future possibility to make the technique available for all OOP languages, therefore bringing its benefits to all OOP developers.