Evaluation of diagnosis support methods in program debugging by trace analysis: An exploratory study
Izuru Kume, Masahide Nakamura, Yasuyuki Tanaka, Etsuya Shibayama · 2016
A Diagnosis explains why a program fails. Making a correct diagnosis is necessary for debugging a practical program, but it requires many efforts to comprehend the program. Supporting program comprehension for making a diagnosis is thus very important Maintainers usually try to comprehend their programs by interacting with debugging tools that permit access to runtime information. These tools should be evaluated based on how they help maintainers' comprehension during the interactions with them. However, most tools are evaluated based only on the final results of maintenance tasks. We are currently developing a method to evaluate the contribution of a supporting tool to a maintainer's internal comprehension process based on the relevance to finding the chain of infection. The relevance is calculated using the trace analysis technology we have developed. In this paper we explain the overview of our evaluation method, and shows its validation by an exploratory experiment.