Over the past six years, Seattle University's Master of Software Engineering program has adopted a common community-based software engineering project as the basis for class projects in a sequence of required and elective courses. These related projects offer a unifying experience for students in the program, allow in-depth treatment of course topics on a real software project, address needs of local non-profit organizations, and better prepare the students for their professional careers through civic engagement and leadership.

Embedded real time control systems typically require the use of special debugging environments, which consist of a special debugging processor that hosts the debugging software and that monitors the execution of the separate target system via a special hardware interface. Our focus is on extending the set of base debugging features typically found in such an environment to provide better support for real time task debugging and to provide a more visual graphic display of program behavior. We have developed a system that provides such facilities, in the form of a task condition specification and checking system and a multi-window graphics display. We have implemented a prototype of these novel debugging features that demonstrates how they work and how they assist in the debugging process. We illustrate the features of our system here by providing a "tour" through an example debugging session. We also comment on various constraints that directed the prototype development process.

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