Pilot Studies on Debugging Oracle Assistants

A debugging oracle is a decisionmaker during a debugging process. Threemajor decisions during typical debugging sessions are on the identities, the locations, and the repairs of faults. A programmer usually acts as a debugging oracle. Our research objective is to help him in his decision-making process with a debugging oracle assistant. To enhance our understanding of both the debugging oracle and the debugging oracle assistant, we studied how 14 expert programmers debug a C program with over 4300 executable lines of code including real faults of omission. Four different forms of debugging oracle assistance were tested. The outcome of the studies provides insight to programmers’ needs and the forms of assistants which fulfill them. We find that information alone does not improve debugging performance. The two assistants that helped programmers make more accurate decisions on faults observed when programmers needed help and provided unsolicited and customized assistance for each programmer. This customized assistance came in the form of hints, questions, confirmation, and/or explanation. Our preliminary results are supported by research on Decision Support System (DSS) and Critic systems. The problems with debugging assistants we identified match the problems identified for DSS. The desirable features to improve DSSs match the desirable features of debugging oracle assistants. Because these features are also the characteristics of Critic systems, we have reason to believe that a desirable debugging oracle assistant is a debugging critic.