I had the opportunity to hear Grady Booch speak many years ago and one thing he mentioned that always remained in my mind was his prediction that some day, in the future, developers would be able to debug applications via the UML. He left me dreaming of the day when I could step through code via a sequence diagram. It looks like someone’s done it! Check out jBixbe.
June 23rd, 2006 at 2:20 pm
As a developer of the mentioned debugger I’m grateful to having this blurb here. We are endeavored to build debug tools that bring more quality into the development process.
A source code debugger turns out to be insufficient for object-oriented applications, when weaknesses of the application design have to be found.
The Unified Modeling Language (UML) has turned out to be an appropriate tool for designing applications. For this reason, it seemed to be quite natural to use these graphical representations not only during the design phase but also to test implemented applications, both on the same conceptual level.
A tool that visualizes applications by means of UML diagrams “at work” could be a very useful extension for usual debuggers. This idea was the starting point for the development of jBixbe.
But of course, source code debugging does not become superfluous and we introduced a top down debugging concept that lets you trace and control the program flow at different view levels (from sequence diagrams up to source code views).
For the future, we want to extend this concept, having more convenient view compositions between different view levels to achieve a more effective debugging of complex object-oriented applications.
For us that’s the way to get a really new quality of debugging.