An empirical study of fault localization for end-user programmers

Ruthruff, Joseph R.; Burnett, Margaret; Rothermel, Gregg

doi:10.1145/1062455.1062523

Cited by 27 publications

(29 citation statements)

References 32 publications

(36 reference statements)

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“…Another area of related work is that of Ruthruff, Burnett, and Rothermel [13]. Ruthruff and colleagues present fault localization techniques for end-user programmers.…”

Section: Discussion Conclusion and Future Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Like Tarantula, they define a visualization for their techniques to enable the user to identify likely faulty areas. In recent work [13], they presented an empirical study that investigates the impact of the information from which they work and separately investigates the mapping to the interface for this information for the user. This approach could be useful in evaluating how our technique is both calculated and then displayed to the user, and we plan to consider such an evaluation for Tarantula.…”

Section: Discussion Conclusion and Future Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Empirical evaluation of the tarantula automatic fault-localization technique

Jones

Harrold

2005

Proceedings of the 20th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering

932

1,059

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The high cost of locating faults in programs has motivated the development of techniques that assist in fault localization by automating part of the process of searching for faults. Empirical studies that compare these techniques have reported the relative effectiveness of four existing techniques on a set of subjects. These studies compare the rankings that the techniques compute for statements in the subject programs and the effectiveness of these rankings in locating the faults. However, it is unknown how these four techniques compare with Tarantula, another existing fault-localization technique, although this technique also provides a way to rank statements in terms of their suspiciousness. Thus, we performed a study to compare the Tarantula technique with the four techniques previously compared. This paper presents our study-it overviews the Tarantula technique along with the four other techniques studied, describes our experiment, and reports and discusses the results. Our studies show that, on the same set of subjects, the Tarantula technique consistently outperforms the other four techniques in terms of effectiveness in fault localization, and is comparable in efficiency to the least expensive of the other four techniques.

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“…Another area of related work is that of Ruthruff, Burnett, and Rothermel [13]. Ruthruff and colleagues present fault localization techniques for end-user programmers.…”

Section: Discussion Conclusion and Future Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussion Conclusion and Future Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Empirical evaluation of the tarantula automatic fault-localization technique

Jones

Harrold

2005

Proceedings of the 20th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering

932

1,059

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…As we have integrated our solutions into existing mainstream EUD environments, we also plan to reuse other solutions that work with these environments, such as debuggers [2], [46], or work with assertions [8]. An interesting research direction is to explore integrations with other EUD environments, including visual programming tools.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

End-User Service Computing: Spreadsheets as a Service Composition Tool

Obrenović

Gašević

2008

IEEE Trans. Serv. Comput.

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Abstract-In this paper, we show how spreadsheets, an end-user development paradigm proven to be highly productive and simple to learn and use, can be used for complex service compositions. We identify the requirements for spreadsheet-based service composition and present our framework that implements these requirements. Our framework enables spreadsheets to send requests and retrieve results from various local and remote services. We show how our tools support different composition patterns and how the style of declarative dependencies of spreadsheets can facilitate service composition. We also discuss novel issues identified by using the framework in several projects and education.Index Terms-Online information services end-user development and service-oriented computing, information systems applications office automation and spreadsheets, software engineering distribution, maintenance, and enhancement.

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“…Prabhakararao and Ruthruff et al performed two human studies to gauge the effectiveness of an interactive fault localization tool developed for end users with little to no experience [21], [24]. The goal of their studies was to evaluate the use of feedback when locating faults and to generally study the process of fault localization, especially by users with no expert domain knowledge of the source.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

A human study of fault localization accuracy

Fry

Weimer

2010

2010 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance

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Abstract-Localizing and repairing defects are critical software engineering activities. Not all programs and not all bugs are equally easy to debug, however. We present formal models, backed by a human study involving 65 participants (from both academia and industry) and 1830 total judgments, relating various software-and defect-related features to human accuracy at locating errors. Our study involves example code from Java textbooks, helping us to control for both readability and complexity. We find that certain types of defects are much harder for humans to locate accurately. For example, humans are over five times more accurate at locating "extra statements" than "missing statements" based on experimental observation. We also find that, independent of the type of defect involved, certain code contexts are harder to debug than others. For example, humans are over three times more accurate at finding defects in code that provides an array abstraction than in code that provides a tree abstraction. We identify and analyze code features that are predictive of human fault localization accuracy. Finally, we present a formal model of debugging accuracy based on those source code features that have a statistically significant correlation with human performance.

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An empirical study of fault localization for end-user programmers

Cited by 27 publications

References 32 publications

Empirical evaluation of the tarantula automatic fault-localization technique

Empirical evaluation of the tarantula automatic fault-localization technique

End-User Service Computing: Spreadsheets as a Service Composition Tool

A human study of fault localization accuracy

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