Appeal No. 1997-2658
Application No. 08/478,974
burden is, therefore, upon Appellants to come forward with
evidence or arguments which persuasively rebut the Examiner’s
prima facie case of obviousness.
After reviewing Appellants’ arguments in response, we
remain convinced of the Examiner’s position as stated in the
Answer. We note that claim 1, contrary to the other appealed
independent claims, is not limited to identification of
program regions by program execution. Rather, claim 1 recites
“collecting code samples” and “analyzing said samples to
identify critical regions.” In our view, the disclosure of
O’Hair would meet these limitations as well as the claimed
display of graphical views of critical regions and related
source code (O’Hair, Figures 3 and 4a). The connections
contained in the intermediate representations of O’Hair are
used to collect program samples and the user can perform
analysis to identify portions in need of debugging (O’Hair,
column 5, lines 46-54).
We also find Appellants’ assertion of error in the
Examiner’s interpretation of the term “critical regions” to be
unpersuasive. We agree with the Examiner (Answer, page 14)
that, barring any limiting defining claim language, the
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