Pilot Study of Progvis : A Visualization Tool for Object Graphs and Concurrency via Shared Memory

Concurrency and synchronization are two topics that are becomingincreasingly important for computer science students due to thehigh number of cores available in most modern devices. These aretopics that many students struggle with at first, perhaps partiallydue to the inherent nondeterminism and the difficulty to test forabsence of race conditions. Furthermore, previous research indicate that some common mistakes when working with concurrencymight be due students not connecting the concurrency concepts(such as synchronization) to the data that needs to be protected,especially when pointers and references are involved.To address these issues, we propose Progvis, which is a visualization tool aimed specifically at concurrency using the sharedmemory model. It provides a detailed visualization of objects inmemory and their relation to the running threads in order to helpstudents connect concurrency issues with the affected data. Wehave performed an initial, small scale evaluation on whether usingthe tool helps students solve synchronization problems during voluntary problem-solving sessions. The preliminary results indicatethat students who used the tool did indeed perform better