A Behavioral Analysis of Programming: On the Use of Interactive Debugging Facilities.

Abstract : Measurement and analysis of user debugging behavior on present interactive systems can lead to an understanding of how future interactive systems should be implemented. The study presents both an analysis of the on-line usage of the TSS/360 Program Control System (PCS) as well as the results of a questionnaire designed to probe the PCS knowledge of the population of users of that system. The questionnaire response population tended to be divided into three competence groups, the highest of which consisted mostly of system support personnel and Assembler language programmers. The on-line usage analysis showed that PCS commands accounted for 7.2 percent of all commands entered by programmers. PCS was used rarely to modify the logic of a program, but was used as a program variable input/output system. (Modified author abstract)