Evaluating a visualisation of the execution of a concurrent program
Jan Lönnberg, Lauri Malmi, Mordechai Ben‐Ari · 2011
In this paper we present a study of how students make use of Atropos, a new visualisation system that is based upon dependence graphs, while debugging concurrent programs. We examine how students work by identifying their operation foci, and use these as a basis for identifying the students' approaches to debugging concurrent programs. We also identify the types of understanding of a concurrent program Atropos helped them to gain, and the situations in which they did not manage to get the information they wanted from Atropos. We use the latter as a starting point for discussing improvements to make Atropos more useful for students.