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Gender differences in end-user debugging strategies

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https://ir.library.oregonstate.edu/concern/technical_reports/mg74qn32p

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  • Little is known about the strategies end-user programmers use in debugging their programs, and even less is known about gender differences that may exist in these strategies. Without this type of information, end-user programming systems cannot know the "target" at which to aim, if they are to support male and female end-user programmers' debugging. In this paper, we present a study investigating this issue. We asked a group of end-user programmers to debug spreadsheets and to describe the strategies they used to carry out this task. Using quantitative and qualitative methods, we analyzed the strategies reported, considered whether the strategies could be confirmed by observations of participants' behaviors, and looked for relation-ships among participants' strategy choices, gender, and debugging success. Our results indicate that males and females debug in quite different ways, that there are considerable opportunities for improving support for end-user debugging strategies for both genders, and that the types of features commonly found to aid debugging may be especially deficient in supporting strategies the females prefer to use in debugging.
  • Keywords: debugging, end-user programming, Office Automation—Spreadsheets, Gender, strategy, Testing and Debugging, end-user software engineering, User/Machine Systems—Human factors, Information Interfaces and Presentation—User Interfaces
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