Design implications for end-user debugging tools : a strategy-based view

Abstract

End-user programmers’ code (e.g., accountants’ spreadsheet formulas) is fraught with errors. To help mitigate this problem, end-user software engineering research is becoming established. However, most of this work has focused on feature usage, rather than debugging strategies. If a debugging tool were to support end-user programmers’ specific debugging strategy needs, what should it take into account and how? To consider the design of such tools, this work contributes a comprehensive overview of end-user debugging strategies at four strategy levels. An example empirical study in Microsoft Excel demonstrates that this view of debugging provides useful insights, and we argue that many of these insights generalize to other environments. Our results include end-user debugging tactics and the effective and ineffective moves employed to achieve them, ten end-user debugging strategems applied to a new environment, and how these strategems were used within three contexts: by strategy used, by sensemaking step, and by debugging phase. These findings coalesce into a comprehensive overview of end-user debugging strategies and detailed implications for the design of strategy-based end-user debugging tools.