A qualitative study on debugging under an enterprise IDE

ContextModern enterprise Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) like Microsoft Visual Studio significantly changed the programming practice from revolving around writing code to including many practices such as the visual design of the UI and database schemas. Despite the surge of productivity in many areas of development, enterprise IDEs still suffer from a high cost of debugging.ObjectiveIn order to identify the causes of difficulties associated with debugging under enterprise IDEs, we studied a group of programmers in a company using an IDE to develop medium size 3-tier software systems. We also elicited possible alleviations for those difficulties.MethodThe qualitative results were generated using the Grounded Theory research approach. The study involved observing 17 programmers debugging stubborn bugs. We coded the major tasks involved in debugging, and then we categorized these tasks in four categories and evaluated the time spent on each of these categories. We then involved those programmers to get an explanation of the causes of those difficulties and to get recommended alleviations.ResultsThe results showed that most of the programmers’ time during debugging is spent on categories of tasks that are directly related to the nature of the enterprise IDE as opposed to classical programming.ConclusionsThe enterprise IDE platform for software development is more than a “better” development tool; it radically reshapes the development landscape shifting the time allocation of developers to new areas. Thus, corresponding fundamental changes and adaptation are needed in the IDE tools, in the way organizations manage their accumulated expertise and even in the programming techniques.