Treffer: Human-Centred Technology Group

This paper proposes a methodology for the study of program comprehension and debugging through the capture and analysis of rich process data. A software debugging environment with enhanced functionality is used to capture these data and a mixture of qualitative and quantitative approaches is employed to analyse them. The functionality added to the software debugging environment allows it to record the programmers ’ verbalisations, their focus of visual attention and their keyboard and mouse actions. These synchronous data are analysed to build a model that relates debugging expertise to strategy in terms of representation coordination and individual differences in representation use.