RuntimeSearch: Ctrl+F for a Running Program
Software Engineering
2018-07-26 v1 Programming Languages
Abstract
Developers often try to find occurrences of a certain term in a software system. Traditionally, a text search is limited to static source code files. In this paper, we introduce a simple approach, RuntimeSearch, where the given term is searched in the values of all string expressions in a running program. When a match is found, the program is paused and its runtime properties can be explored with a traditional debugger. The feasibility and usefulness of RuntimeSearch is demonstrated on a medium-sized Java project.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1807.09679,
title = {RuntimeSearch: Ctrl+F for a Running Program},
author = {Matúš Sulír and Jaroslav Porubän},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1807.09679},
year = {2018}
}