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How Programmers Debug, Revisited: An Information Foraging Theory Perspective Public Deposited

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https://ir.library.oregonstate.edu/concern/articles/wp988m02z

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Abstract
  • Many theories of human debugging rely on complex mental constructs that offer little practical advice to builders of software engineering tools. Although hypotheses are important in debugging, a theory of navigation adds more practical value to our understanding of how programmers debug. Therefore, in this paper, we reconsider how people go about debugging in large collections of source code using a modern programming environment. We present an information foraging theory of debugging that treats programmer navigation during debugging as being analogous to a predator following scent to find prey in the wild. The theory proposes that constructs of scent and topology provide enough information to describe and predict programmer navigation during debugging, without reference to mental states such as hypotheses. We investigate the scope of our theory through an empirical study of 10 professional programmers debugging a real-world open source program. We found that the programmers' verbalizations far more often concerned scent-following than hypotheses. To evaluate the predictiveness of our theory, we created an executable model that predicted programmer navigation behavior more accurately than comparable models that did not consider information scent. Finally, we discuss the implications of our results for enhancing software engineering tools.
  • This is the author's peer-reviewed final manuscript, as accepted by the publisher. The published article is copyrighted by IEEE and can be found at: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/RecentIssue.jsp?punumber=32. ©201X IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works.
  • Keywords: Debugging, Programmer navigation, Software maintenance, Information scent, Information foraging theory, Empirical software engineering
  • Keywords: Debugging, Programmer navigation, Software maintenance, Information scent, Information foraging theory, Empirical software engineering
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  • Lawrance, J., Bogart, C., Burnett, M., Bellamy, R., Rector, K., & Fleming, S. D. (2013). How programmers debug, revisited: An information foraging theory perspective. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 39(2) 197-215. doi: 10.1109/TSE.2010.111
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  • 39
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  • 2
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  • Much of this work was performed during M. Burnett’s sabbatical stay at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. This work was also supported in part by the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research FA9550-09-1-0213, by the EUSES Consortium via NSF ITR-0325273, by an IBM International Faculty Award, and by J. Lawrance’s IBM PhD Scholarship.
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