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

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https://ir.library.oregonstate.edu/concern/technical_reports/m900p0604

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  • 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.
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  • 1. Introduction and Related Work 1.1. Problem Addressed and Terminology 1.2. Background and Related Work 1.3. Research Contributions and Overview of this Paper 2. Study Methodology 2.1. Participants 2.2. Procedure, Task, and Materials 2.3. Spreadsheet Environment and Tutorial 2.4. Analysis Methodology 3. Low-Level Strategy Items: Moves and Tactics 3.1. Some Well-Supported Tactics 3.2. Improving Support for Tactics 4. High-Level Strategy Items: Strategems and Strategies 4.1. Generalizing Ten End-User Debugging Strategems across Three Environments 4.2. The Missing To-Do Listing Strategem and Two End-User Debugging Strategies 5. Strategems in Context 5.1. Strategems in the Context of Strategies by Debugging Phase 5.2. Strategems in the Context of Sensemaking Three Outlier Strategems in the Context of Sensemaking Strategems during Foraging versus Sensemaking Steps Strategems used Successfully during Schema and other Sensemaking Steps 6. Conclusions, Discussion, and Future Work Notes References Figure and Table Captions Figures
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