A breakpoint, in software development, is an intentional stopping or pausing place in a program, put in place for debugging purposes. More generally, a breakpoint is a means of acquiring knowledge about a program during its execution. During the interruption, the programmer inspects the test environment (logs, memory, files, etc.) to find out whether the program functions as expected.

In practice, a breakpoint consists of one or more conditions that determine when a program's execution should be interrupted. Most commonly, the program's execution is interrupted before a programmer-specified instruction is executed. Other kinds of conditions, such as the modification of a specific area in memory, or at a particular time, or upon a keystroke, are also used.