An empirical study of fault localization for end-user programmers

End users develop more software than any other group of programmers, using software authoring devices such as e-mail filtering editors, by-demonstration macro builders, and spreadsheet environments. Despite this, there has been little research on finding ways to help these programmers with the dependability of their software. We have been addressing this problem in several ways, one of which includes supporting end-user debugging activities through fault localization techniques. This paper presents the results of an empirical study conducted in an end-user programming environment to examine the impact of two separate factors in fault localization techniques that affect technique effectiveness. Our results shed new insights into fault localization techniques for end-user programmers and the factors that affect them, with significant implications for the evaluation of those techniques

Semi-automatic fault localization and behavior verification for physical system simulation models

Mathematical modeling and simulation of complex physical systems are emerging as key technologies in engineering. Modern approaches to physical system simulation allow users to specify simulation models with the help of equation-based languages. Due to the highlevel declarative abstraction of these languages program errors are extremely hard to find. This paper presents an algorithmic semi-automated debugging framework for equation-based modeling languages. We show how program slicing and dicing performed at the intermediate code level combined with assertion checking techniques can automate, to a large extent, the error finding process and behavior verification for physical system simulation models. 1