Reusing Bugged Source Code to Support Novice Programmers in Debugging Tasks

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.