Debugging as Evidence-Driven Reasoning: Visualization Opportunities in Data-Intensive Programming

2026-06-29

AI Summary

Debugging in data-intensive programming faces significant challenges, including fragmented evidence, difficulty in discerning discrepancies between expected and observed behaviors, and the complexity of tracking state evolution across components. Through semi-structured interviews and thematic analysis, this study systematically characterizes practitioners’ debugging practices and, for the first time, identifies three core requirements: cross-artifact evidence alignment, expectation-based comparison mechanisms, and traceable state evolution. Building on these insights, the work constructs a visualization-driven design space tailored to debugging in data-intensive contexts, exposing critical gaps in existing tools and providing a theoretical foundation and clear direction for the development of future debugging aids.

Abstract

Visualization has been recognized as a valuable means of supporting debugging by externalizing runtime behavior that would otherwise remain hidden or scattered. However, most visual debugging research has focused on traditional software development settings, leaving the distinct challenges of data-intensive workflows largely uncharacterized. To build visual debugging support for these settings, we first need to characterize how practitioners debug in these settings and translate their challenges into concrete visualization opportunities. To this end, we conducted semi-structured interviews with nine participants from diverse data-intensive domains and analyzed the data using thematic analysis. Our analysis reveals three cross-cutting challenge: assembling fragmented evidence, detecting expected-observed discrepancies, and tracing state evolution across workflow components. We distill these challenges into three concrete requirements that current debuggers support only partially but that visualization is well suited to address: cross-artifact evidence alignment, expectation-grounded comparison, and traceable state evolution. Together, these requirements begin to characterize a design space for future visual debugging research in data-intensive programming.

Problem

• visual debugging
• data-intensive programming
• debugging challenges
• workflow debugging
• evidence-driven reasoning

Innovation

• visual debugging
• data-intensive programming
• evidence alignment
• expectation-grounded comparison
• traceable state evolution