Harnessing curiosity to increase correctness in end-user programming

Abstract

Despite their ability to help with program correctness, assertions have been notoriously unpopular-even with professional programmers. End-user programmers seem even less likely to appreciate the value of assertions; yet end-user programs suffer from serious correctness problems that assertions could help detect. This leads to the following question: can end users be enticed to enter assertions? To investigate this question, we have devised a curiosity-centered approach to eliciting assertions from end users, built on a surprise-explain-reward strategy. Our follow-up work with end-user participants shows that the approach is effective in encouraging end users to enter assertions that help them find errors.

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“…Once they had this positive experience, they continued to use it throughout the experiment. This is in keeping with previous successful uses of the Surprise-Explain-Reward strategy [34,31], suggesting that making a low-cost high-reward alternative visible can motivate users to employ it, when they otherwise would not have even realized it existed.…”

“…Surprise-Explain-Reward [34] is a strategy that has been successfully used in software to attract users' attention to unfamiliar features. It attempts to arouse the user's curiosity about a potentially surprising new feature; he or she can then pursue an interest in the feature by invoking minimalist forms of explanation [11] and, potentially, reap rewards.…”

Cleanroom: Edit-Time Error Detection with the Uniqueness Heuristic

“…This is akin to the surprise-explainreward design strategy [11], in which some knowledge gap draws a user's attention to an explanation, which enables them to take some action to gain some reward. In the case of Cleanroom, the surprise is the discrepancy between a developer's expectations about whether the Cleanroom warning will disappear and whether it actually does.…”

Impact of interruption style on end-user debugging

“…In our work on supporting debugging by end-user programmers, interruptions are a vehicle for attempting to surprise the user as part of our Surprise-Explain-Reward strategy [20]. The element of surprise is used to arouse users' curiosity about two types of things: (1) features in the environment that might help them debug, and (2) locations in the program where the system believes bugs are lurking.…”