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Student Debugging Practices and Their Relationships with Project Outcomes

Published: 22 February 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Debugging is an important part of the software development process, studied by both the CS education and software engineering communities. Most prior work has focused either on novice or professional programmers. Intermediate-to-advanced students (such as those enrolled in post-CS2 Data Structures courses) who are working on large and complex projects have largely been ignored. We present results from an empirical observational study that examined junior-level undergraduate students' debugging practices on relatively large (4-week lifecycle) projects, using IDE clickstream data collected by a custom Eclipse plugin. Specifically, we hypothesize that there are differing debugging behaviors exhibited, and that differing behaviors lead to differing project out-comes. For example, how often do students use the symbolic debugger available in modern IDEs, versus how often do they use diagnostic print statements, or both? What triggers a debugging session? What follows a debugging session? Does it matter when in the project lifecycle that debugging takes place? We have a number of interesting preliminary results. When using the debugger, there was a negative relationship between step-over and step-into actions versus final course grades, indicating that when students "spin their wheels" while debugging, they tend to perform more poorly. Students also tend to perform better on the project when debugging takes place earlier in the overall project life-cycle. We developed an algorithm to identify diagnostic print statements in the students' projects. We found that over 90% used at least one diagnostic print statement, and about 75% used the symbolic debugger, at least once in any given project.

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  • (2023)“It’s Weird That it Knows What I Want”: Usability and Interactions with Copilot for Novice ProgrammersACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction10.1145/361736731:1(1-31)Online publication date: 29-Nov-2023

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cover image ACM Conferences
SIGCSE '19: Proceedings of the 50th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education
February 2019
1364 pages
ISBN:9781450358903
DOI:10.1145/3287324
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 22 February 2019

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Author Tags

  1. debugging
  2. incremental development
  3. intermediate students

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SIGCSE '19
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SIGCSE '19 Paper Acceptance Rate 169 of 526 submissions, 32%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 1,595 of 4,542 submissions, 35%

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SIGCSE TS 2025
The 56th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education
February 26 - March 1, 2025
Pittsburgh , PA , USA

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Cited By

View all
  • (2023)“It’s Weird That it Knows What I Want”: Usability and Interactions with Copilot for Novice ProgrammersACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction10.1145/361736731:1(1-31)Online publication date: 29-Nov-2023

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