A human study of patch maintainability
Proceedings of the 2012 International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis
An empirical study about the effectiveness of debugging when random test cases are used
Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Software Engineering
More testers - The effect of crowd size and time restriction in software testing
Information and Software Technology
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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.