Proceedings Article10.1145/1352135.1352193
Backstop: a tool for debugging runtime errors
Christian Murphy,Eunhee Kim,Gail E. Kaiser,Adam Cannon +3 more
- 12 Mar 2008
- Vol. 40, Iss: 1, pp 173-177
TL;DR: Backstop is presented, a tool for debugging runtime errors in Java applications that provides more user-friendly error messages when an uncaught exception occurs, and also provides debugging support by allowing users to watch the execution of the program and the changes to the values of variables.
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Abstract: The errors that Java programmers are likely to encounter can roughly be categorized into three groups: compile-time (semantic and syntactic), logical, and runtime (exceptions). While much work has focused on the first two, there are very few tools that exist for interpreting the sometimes cryptic messages that result from runtime errors. Novice programmers in particular have difficulty dealing with uncaught exceptions in their code and the resulting stack traces, which are by no means easy to understand. We present Backstop, a tool for debugging runtime errors in Java applications. This tool provides more user-friendly error messages when an uncaught exception occurs, and also provides debugging support by allowing users to watch the execution of the program and the changes to the values of variables. We also present the results of two preliminary studies conducted on introductory-level programmers using the two different features of the tool.
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Citations
Introductory programming: a systematic literature review
Andrew Luxton-Reilly,Simon,Ibrahim Al-Bluwi,Brett A. Becker,Michail N. Giannakos,Amruth N. Kumar,Linda Ott,James H. Paterson,Michael James Scott,Judy Sheard,Claudia Szabo +10 more
- 02 Jul 2018
TL;DR: An ITiCSE working group conducted a systematic review of the introductory programming literature to explore trends, highlight advances in knowledge over the past 15 years, and indicate possible directions for future research.
Compiler Error Messages Considered Unhelpful: The Landscape of Text-Based Programming Error Message Research
Brett A. Becker,Paul Denny,Raymond Pettit,Durell Bouchard,Dennis Bouvier,Brian Harrington,Amir Kamil,Amey Karkare,Chris McDonald,Peter-Michael Osera,Janice L. Pearce,James Prather +11 more
- 18 Dec 2019
TL;DR: A comprehensive, historical and state-of-the-art report on research in the area, synthesise and present the existing evidence for these messages including the difficulties they present and their effectiveness, and makes the bibtex file of the 300+ reference corpus publicly available.
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A Complete Bibliography of Publications in SIGCSE Bulletin: 2000{2009
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- 01 Jan 2012
TL;DR: 2012 [AS13b, Wal12a], 2013 [Alv13, Bar13, Cam13, Car13, CCS13, Cut13, Edi14, Swe13].
Analysis of research into the teaching and learning of programming
Judy Sheard,S. Simon,Margaret Hamilton,Jan Lönnberg +3 more
- 10 Aug 2009
TL;DR: An analysis of research papers about programming education that were published in computing education conferences in the years 2005 to 2008 using Simon's classification scheme to identify the papers of interest.
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Effective compiler error message enhancement for novice programming students
Brett A. Becker,Graham Glanville,Ricardo Iwashima,Claire M McDonnell,Kyle Goslin,Catherine Mooney +5 more
TL;DR: Results show that the intervention group experienced reductions in the number of overall errors, errors per student, and several repeated error metrics, which are important as the effectiveness of CEM enhancement has been recently debated.
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