A study based on TAM model about debugging tools

Debugging is the task of locating and fixing defects in a program.Despite the increase of its importance in last decades, debuggingis responsible for a large part of costs in a software project by organizations.Among the techniques proposed to minimize thesedifficulties, Spectrum-Based Fault Localization (SFL) is a promisingdebugging technique due to it is relative low execution cost.Recently, visualization tools have been proposed to represent thesuspicious values of program elements with SFL techniques in differentmetaphors. Some tools use textual representation and others avisual representation. In this paper, we compare two SFL debuggingtools. Jaguar presents the most suspicious elements of a programin a list sorted by suspicious values. CodeForest represents the programin a three dimensional cacti forest. In this article are presentedthe results of an evaluation with 119 students to assess the usabilityperception of these tools to the fault localization by TechnologyAcceptance Model (TAM). This model aims to help organizationsduring the evaluation of new technologies. The results of studyshow that Jaguar has greater usability than CodeForest; however,the statistical effect size observed is low between them