CAREER: SHF: Debugging Mental Models

职业：SHF：调试心理模型

• 批准号: 1845508
• 负责人: Thomas LaToza
• 金额: $ 51.5万
• 依托单位: George Mason University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2019
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2019-02-01 至 2025-01-31
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1845508&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: CAREER; SHF; Debugging; Mental; Models

When software fails to behave as intended, a software developer working to address this issue engages in the activity of debugging. Debugging is often challenging, as developers must generate possible hypotheses about a failure's cause, laboriously test hypotheses by reasoning about the behavior of complex code, and use debugging tools to generate and identify relevant runtime state. These challenges may be manifest to software users as software with unfixed defects and increased software cost. In addition, expert developers have knowledge which, if extracted, would be valuable in helping to debug more easily. Experts have long been shown to do even simple programming tasks over ten times more quickly than non-experts, largely because they have seen similar situations before. This project addresses the question of the nature of mental models of debugging and the creation of a scientific foundation for understanding, externalizing, and sharing expert insight into the runtime behavior of programs.This project encompasses a comprehensive set of activities for conducting studies of software developers and designing new forms of debugging tools. A broad sample of developers will be observed to collect sketches capturing mental models from debugging tasks, abstract common building blocks, and count the frequency of these building blocks. New types of debugging tools will be designed which enable developers to externalize their mental models by recording, abstracting, and replaying queries over program executions and visualizing relationships between elements within program executions. New debugging tools will be evaluated through user studies to understand if and how developers may externalize and share their debugging mental models. Together, these activities will deepen the scientific understanding of how developers debug and create new techniques for developers to work more effectively.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

当软件无法按预期运行时，致力于解决此问题的软件开发人员会参与调试活动。调试通常具有挑战性，因为开发人员必须生成关于故障原因的可能假设，通过推理复杂代码的行为来费力地测试假设，并使用调试工具来生成和识别相关的运行时状态。这些挑战对于软件用户来说可能是明显的，因为软件具有未修复的缺陷和增加的软件成本。此外，专家开发人员拥有的知识，如果提取出来，将有助于更容易地调试。长期以来，专家甚至比非专家更快地完成简单的编程任务，这主要是因为他们以前见过类似的情况。该项目旨在解决调试的心理模型的本质问题，并为理解、外化和分享程序运行时行为的专家见解建立科学基础。该项目包括一系列全面的活动，用于对软件开发人员进行研究并设计新形式的调试工具。 将观察一个广泛的开发人员样本，以收集草图，从调试任务中捕获心理模型，抽象常见的构建块，并计算这些构建块的频率。将设计新型的调试工具，使开发人员能够通过记录，抽象和重放对程序执行的查询以及可视化程序执行中元素之间的关系来外部化他们的心理模型。新的调试工具将通过用户研究进行评估，以了解开发人员是否以及如何外部化和共享他们的调试心理模型。这些活动将加深对开发人员如何调试和创建新技术的科学理解，以使开发人员更有效地工作。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

项目成果

Edit - Run Behavior in Programming and Debugging

编辑 - 编程和调试中的运行行为

• DOI: 10.1109/vl/hcc51201.2021.9576170
• 发表时间: 2021
• 期刊: 2021 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC
• 作者: Alaboudi, Abdulaziz;LaToza, Thomas D.
• 通讯作者: LaToza, Thomas D.

What constitutes debugging? An exploratory study of debugging episodes

• DOI: 10.1007/s10664-023-10352-5
• 发表时间: 2023-09
• 期刊: Empirical Software Engineering
• 影响因子: 4.1
• 作者: Abdulaziz Alaboudi;Thomas D. Latoza

Barriers in Front-End Web Development

前端 Web 开发的障碍

• DOI: 10.1109/vl/hcc53370.2022.9833127
• 发表时间: 2022
• 期刊: Proceedings IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human Centric Computing
• 作者: Samudio, David I.;LaToza, Thomas D.
• 通讯作者: LaToza, Thomas D.

ChatGPT and Software Testing Education: Promises & Perils

• DOI: 10.1109/icstw58534.2023.00078
• 发表时间: 2023-02
• 期刊: 2023 IEEE International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation Workshops (ICSTW)
• 作者: Sajed Jalil;Suzzana Rafi;Thomas D. Latoza;Kevin Moran;Wing Lam

Can microtask programming work in industry?

微任务编程可以在工业中使用吗？

• DOI: 10.1145/3368089.3417046
• 发表时间: 2020
• 期刊: Proceedings of the 28th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering
• 作者: Saito, Shinobu;Iimura, Yukako;Aghayi, Emad;LaToza, Thomas D.
• 通讯作者: LaToza, Thomas D.