User evaluation of a domain specific program comprehension tool

The user evaluation in this paper concerns a domain-specific tool to support the comprehension of large safety-critical component-based software systems for the maritime sector. We discuss the context and motivation of our research, and present the user-specific details of our tool, called FlowTracker. We include a walk-through of the system and present the profiles of our prospective users. Next, we discuss the design of an exploratory qualitative study that we have conducted to evaluate the usability and effectiveness of our tool. We conclude with a summary of lessons learned and challenges that we see for user evaluation of such domain-specific program comprehension tools.