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Arthur V. Lopes

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Arthur V. Lopes

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Publications by Arthur V. Lopes (bibliography)

» 1993 «

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Lopes, Arthur V., Heller, Rachelle S., Feldman, Michael B. and Martin, Dianne C. (1993): Very High-Level Debugging: How Novice Ada Concurrent Programmers Respond to ADAT. In: Cook, Curtis, Scholtz, Jean and Spohrer, James C. (eds.) Empirical Studies of Programmers - Fifth Workshop December 3-15, 1993, 1993, Palo Alto, California. p. 226.

“This paper describes the study that was carried out to evaluate how novice concurrent Ada programmers respond to an Automated Debugger for Ada Tasks (ADAT). ADAT is a programming tool that implements a debugging concept in which non-syntactic errors are detected and the user is guided to correct the errors. The process of identifying and correcting a non-syntactic error is named Very High-Level Debugging. The traditional static analysis was extended through the use of a rule-based system (CLIPS). The source code of a SmallAda (student compiler for an Ada subset) program is searched for likely execution-time anomalies in task activation and communication. Some race conditions and deadlocks are among the anomalies dealt by ADAT. Each anomaly is associated with a corrective procedure. ADAT was implemented to test the idea of Very High-Level Debugging. An experiment was performed using two groups of 20 subjects each. An experimental group and a control group were used in a two stage experiment. In stage one, the subjects in the experimental group used the SmallAda system with the ADAT tool available, and the subjects in the control group used the SmallAda system without the ADAT tool. Subjects from both groups were asked to find and correct one bug in each of two Small-Ada programs. The SAPM (SmallAda Parallel Monitoring) tool was available in both groups. In Stage Two, both groups were asked to use the SmallAda system to extend a SmallAda concurrent program. At this stage of this experiment, the conditions under which the subjects worked were identical. The goal of the experiment was to test the following two hypothesis: a) The use of the ADAT improves the performance of the debugging activity; b) The use of the ADAT provides an improvement in the understanding of concurrency. Analysis of the experimental results showed that ADAT improves the performance of the debugging activity as well as the learning process. ADAT also shows promise as an intelligent trainer.”

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Lopes, Arthur V. and Nagy, Thomas J. (1993): Testing ADAT -- An Automated Debugger for Ada Tasks. In: East-West International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction: Proceedings of the EWHCI93 1993. pp. 29-44.

“This paper describes the evaluation of ADAT (Automated Debugger for Ada Tasks). As a concurrent Small Ada program compiles, it generates a higher level abstraction of the program's intertask interactions. These abstractions are entered into CLIPS in the form of facts. Next, the CLIPS inference engine matches the facts against the rules which emulate the debugging knowledge of an expert Ada programmer. For cases where mismatches exist, ADAT issues an explanation of the error and its location and, when possible, ADAT also provides guidance on how to correct the problem. The details of the above individual steps are hidden from the user. ADAT was developed using a combination of Small Ada and CLIPS.”

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