BPGen: An Automated Breakpoint Generator for Debugging

During debugging processes, breakpoints are frequently used to inspect and understand runtime behaviors of programs. Although most development environments offer convenient breakpoint facilities, the use of these environments usually requires considerable human e orts in order to generate useful breakpoints. Before setting breakpoints or typing break-point conditions, developers usually have to make some judgements and hypotheses on the basis of their observations and experience. To reduce this kind of efforts the paper presents a tool, named BPGen, to automatically generate breakpoints for debugging. BPGen uses three well-known dynamic fault localization techniques in tandem to identify suspicious pro-gram statements and states, through which both conditional and unconditional breakpoints are generated. BPGen is implemented as an Eclipse plugin for supplementing the existing Eclipse JDT debugger.