TraceGraph 4: A Demonstration Case Study

SERC-TR-290
July, 2007

Michael Jiang, Jing Zhang
Motorola, Inc.
Sharon Simmons, Dennis Edwards, Norman Wilde
Department of Computer Science, University of West Florida

Executive Summary

TraceGraph 4 is a tool to assist a software engineer in locating and understanding the code for a specific software feature. It has been developed as part of a project of the Software Engineering Research Center (SERC) with input and support from SERC affiliate Motorola.

This report describes a case study of TraceGraph 4 carried out at Motorola in May of 2007. The main objective of the study was to see if the tool was ready for possible application to large Motorola software systems.

The two subjects in the study used TraceGraph 4 to locate two seeded feature-related bugs in a 123 KLOC Motorola system. Each bug was located correctly in about 20 to 25 minutes of work. The subjects made several suggestions for non-critical improvements and, overall, the tool was judged to be sufficiently robust for trials on larger Motorola projects.


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