Visual Breakpoint Debugging for Sum and Product Formulae

Software debugging is one of the most time consuming source code related tasks. Hence, we propose a novel approach to breakpoint debugging for formula code, i.e. source code implementing mathematical formulae. In this work, the focus is on source code which computes a numerical value via arithmetic operations as well as sum- and product formulae. We introduce and discuss breakpoints placed on an automatically inferred mathematical representation, i.e. in a common mathematical notation or by a mixed form of source code artifacts and maths symbols. Furthermore, we present visual debugging features aiming to facilitate the dynamic inspection of the formula code leveraging the mathematical representation. We briefly present a first prototype implementation of our formula debugging approach and indicate future directions of our work.