Print Email Facebook Twitter A controlled experiment for program comprehension through trace visualization Title A controlled experiment for program comprehension through trace visualization Author Cornelissen, B. Zaidman, A. Faculty Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science Department Software Computer Technology Date 2009-12-31 Abstract Accepted version for publication in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. Software maintenance activities require a sufficient level of understanding of the software at hand that unfortunately is not always readily available. Execution trace visualization is a common approach in gaining this understanding, and among our own efforts in this context is EXTRAVIS, a tool for the visualization of large traces. While many such tools have been evaluated through case studies, there have been no quantitative evaluations to the present day. This paper reports on the first controlled experiment to quantitatively measure the added value of trace visualization for program comprehension. We designed eight typical tasks aimed at gaining an understanding of a representative subject system, and measured how a control group (using the Eclipse IDE) and an experimental group (using both Eclipse and EXTRAVIS) performed in terms of correctness and time spent. The results are statistically significant in both regards, showing a 22% decrease in time needed for the given tasks, and a 43% increase in correctness of the results for the group using trace visualization. Subject program comprehensiondynamic analysiscontrolled experiment To reference this document use: http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:885be1fc-758d-47b1-ab75-e9f4b3640aca Publisher Delft University of Technology, Software Engineering Research Group ISSN 1872-5392 Source Technical Report Series TUD-SERG-2009-001 Other version https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2010.47 Part of collection Institutional Repository Document type report Rights (c) 2009 by the authors of this report. Software Engineering Research Group, Department ofSoftware Technology, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science, Delft University of Technology. All rights reserved. No part of this series may be reproduced in any form or by any means without prior written permission of the authors.IEEE Files PDF TUD-SERG-2009-001.pdf 1015.75 KB Close viewer /islandora/object/uuid:885be1fc-758d-47b1-ab75-e9f4b3640aca/datastream/OBJ/view