An experimental study of flowcharts as an aid to identification of procedural faults

Abstract

Experimental studies of the flowchart as an aid to debugging programmes or other procedural descriptions have provided ambiguous results. An experiment which removes some of the procedural problems of earlier studies is reported. It is concluded that the presentation of procedural information in the form of a flowchart has no effect of increasing the number of correct identification of faults.

There is some evidence that subjects familiar with the use of directed graphs may be better at idenlifying the general area of failure and that flowcharts may clarify the description of conditional statements, without necessarily improving understanding of the underlying logic.