Novice programmers often encounter difficulties performing debugging tasks effectively. Even if modern development environments (IDEs) provide high-level support for navigating through code elements and for identifying the right conditions leading to the bug, debugging still requires considerable human effort. Programmers usually have to make hypotheses that are based on both program state evolution and their past debugging experiences. To mitigate this effort and allow novice programmers to gain debugging experience quickly, we propose an approach based on the reuse of existing bugs of open source systems to provide informed guidance from the failure site to the fault position. The goal is to help novices in reasoning on the most promising paths to follow and conditions to define. We implemented this approach as a tool that exploits the knowledge about fault and bug position in the system, as long as any bug of the system is known. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is validated through a quasi-experiment that qualitatively and quantitatively evaluates how the debugging performances of the students change when they are trained using the tool.

Reusing bugged source code to support novice programmers in debugging tasks

Ardimento P.;
2019-01-01

Abstract

Novice programmers often encounter difficulties performing debugging tasks effectively. Even if modern development environments (IDEs) provide high-level support for navigating through code elements and for identifying the right conditions leading to the bug, debugging still requires considerable human effort. Programmers usually have to make hypotheses that are based on both program state evolution and their past debugging experiences. To mitigate this effort and allow novice programmers to gain debugging experience quickly, we propose an approach based on the reuse of existing bugs of open source systems to provide informed guidance from the failure site to the fault position. The goal is to help novices in reasoning on the most promising paths to follow and conditions to define. We implemented this approach as a tool that exploits the knowledge about fault and bug position in the system, as long as any bug of the system is known. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is validated through a quasi-experiment that qualitatively and quantitatively evaluates how the debugging performances of the students change when they are trained using the tool.
File in questo prodotto:
File Dimensione Formato  
2019_TOCE_Ardimento.pdf

non disponibili

Tipologia: Documento in Versione Editoriale
Licenza: NON PUBBLICO - Accesso privato/ristretto
Dimensione 2 MB
Formato Adobe PDF
2 MB Adobe PDF   Visualizza/Apri   Richiedi una copia
ASN_2019_TOCE_PostPrint.pdf

non disponibili

Descrizione: Post-print version
Tipologia: Documento in Post-print
Licenza: NON PUBBLICO - Accesso privato/ristretto
Dimensione 971.39 kB
Formato Adobe PDF
971.39 kB Adobe PDF   Visualizza/Apri   Richiedi una copia

I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.

Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11586/256164
Citazioni
  • ???jsp.display-item.citation.pmc??? ND
  • Scopus 10
  • ???jsp.display-item.citation.isi??? 3
social impact