"But it looks right!": the bugs students don't see

  • Authors:
  • David Ginat;Owen Astrachan;Daniel D. Garcia;Mark Guzdial

  • Affiliations:
  • Tel-Aviv University;Duke University;University of California, Berkeley;Georgia Institute of Technology

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 35th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

It is not rare that programming students are surprised when they encounter bugs in their program, which "looks completely right". Such a phenomenon expresses lack of awareness of analysis, design, and testing habits, which yield undesirable outcomes. The special session will focus on various programming aspects that may look seemingly right to students, but yield a buggy, wrong result. Various aspects will be displayed, illustrated, and discussed with the audience, in order to better understand the characteristics of bugs and ways of coping with them in our teaching.