Novice Reflections on Debugging

Abstract

Despite decades of literature calling for research on teaching debugging, we still lack clear guidelines on how to teach debugging processes effectively. This is a significant problem as debugging is an activity that is a key component of software development and a frustrating and time-consuming barrier to students who are learning to program. In this paper we reflect on teaching and learning debugging through the lens of student beliefs about their own debugging practice. We find that few students use systematic approaches such as the scientific method of hypothesis generation and testing that is informally adopted by many software developers. Some students appeared to be satisfied with their ad hoc approaches while others expressed a desire to develop more thorough approaches.