Visual Debugging for Data Workflows

Visualization opportunities for evidence-driven debugging in data-intensive programming.

Debugging in pandas notebooks and similar data workflows is often an evidence-driven reasoning process: practitioners assemble clues from code, outputs, and intermediate states to locate expected–observed discrepancies.

Through interviews with practitioners, this project characterizes cross-cutting debugging challenges and translates them into visualization requirements—cross-artifact evidence alignment, expectation-grounded comparison, and traceable state evolution.

Outcomes

  • First-author short paper at IEEE VIS 2026
  • Related full manuscript under review at ACM CHI 2027
  • Ongoing prototype for side-by-side expectation–observation comparison

Advisor: Prof. Rebecca Faust