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Although researchers have begun to explicitly support enduser programmers' debugging by providing information to help them find bugs, there is little research addressing the proper mechanism to alert the user to this information. The choice of alerting mechanism can be important, because as previous research has shown, different interruption styles have different potential advantages and disadvantages. To explore impacts of interruptions in the end-user debugging domain, this paper describes an empirical comparison of two interruption styles that have been used to alert end-user programmers to debugging information. Our results show that negotiated-style interruptions were superior to immediate-style interruptions in several issues of importance to end-user debugging, and further suggest that a reason for this superiority may be that immediate-style interruptions encourage different debugging strategies.

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End-user programmers are writing an unprecedented number of programs, due in large part to the significant effort put forth to bring programming power to end users. Unfortunately, this effort has not been supplemented by a comparable effort to increase the correctness of these often faulty programs. To address this need, we have been working towards bringing fault localization techniques to end users. In order to understand how end users are affected by and interact with such techniques, we conducted a think-aloud study, examining the interactive, human-centric ties between end-user debugging and a fault localization technique. Our results provide insights into the contributions such techniques can make to an interactive end-user debugging process.

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