Supporting Debugging in a Heterogeneous, Globally Distributed Environment

Model-Driven Engineering has emerged as a software development paradigm that can assist in separating the issues of the problem space of a software system from the complexities of implementation in the solution space. As software systems have become more complex, a need for multiple abstractions to describe a single system has emerged. The development teams of these massive systems are also often geographically distributed. These emerging concerns for MDE systems have led to a need for a heterogeneous, and potentially globally distributed, modeling environment. As these modeling environments are being explored, new challenges are being uncovered. In this paper, we discuss the need for debugging support in heterogeneous, globally distributed modeling systems and identify a number of challenges related to debugging that must be overcome to support this evolving paradigm for software development.