Extending Omniscient Debugging to Support Aspect-Oriented Programming

Debugging is a tedious and costly process that demands a profound understanding of the dynamic behavior of programs. Debugging aspect-oriented software is even more difficult: to implement the semantics of aspects, a, number of implicit activities are performed, whose relation to source code is less direct to grasp. We show how omniscient debugging, a technique that consists in recording the activity of a program to later navigate in its history, can be extended to suit the particularities of aspect-oriented software. By enhancing program understandability, improvements to the tooling associated with aspect orientation will encourage the widespread acceptance of this emerging paradigm.