Title
Debugger Canvas: Industrial experience with the code bubbles paradigm
Abstract
At ICSE 2010, the Code Bubbles team from Brown University and the Code Canvas team from Microsoft Research presented similar ideas for new user experiences for an integrated development environment. Since then, the two teams formed a collaboration, along with the Microsoft Visual Studio team, to release Debugger Canvas, an industrial version of the Code Bubbles paradigm. With Debugger Canvas, a programmer debugs her code as a collection of code bubbles, annotated with call paths and variable values, on a two-dimensional pan-and-zoom surface. In this experience report, we describe new user interface ideas, describe the rationale behind our design choices, evaluate the performance overhead of the new design, and provide user feedback based on lab participants, post-release usage data, and a user survey and interviews. We conclude that the code bubbles paradigm does scale to existing customer code bases, is best implemented as a mode in the existing user experience rather than a replacement, and is most useful when the user has a long or complex call paths, a large or unfamiliar code base, or complex control patterns, like factories or dynamic linking.
Year
DOI
Venue
2012
10.1109/ICSE.2012.6227113
Software Engineering
Keywords
Field
DocType
program debugging,user interfaces,Brown University,Microsoft Visual Studio team,code bubbles paradigm,code canvas team,debugger canvas,integrated development environment,two-dimensional pan-and-zoom surface,user feedback,user interface,experience report,human factors,integrated development environments,user interfaces
User experience design,Programmer,Software engineering,Computer science,Debugger,Microsoft Visual Studio,Human–computer interaction,User interface,Usage data,Web server,Debugging
Conference
Volume
ISSN
ISBN
2
0270-5257 E-ISBN : 978-1-4673-1065-9
978-1-4673-1065-9
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
20
0.89
17
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Robert DeLine12957210.35
Andrew Bragdon242418.93
Kael Rowan3211.58
Jens Jacobsen4200.89
Steven P. Reiss52065436.05