Impact of interruption style on end-user debugging

ABSTRACT

Although researchers have begun to explicitly support end-user programmers' debugging by providing information to help them find bugs, there is little research addressing the proper mechanism to alert the user to this information. The choice of alerting mechanism can be important, because as previous research has shown, different interruption styles have different potential advantages and disadvantages. To explore impacts of interruptions in the end-user debugging domain, this paper describes an empirical comparison of two interruption styles that have been used to alert end-user programmers to debugging information. Our results show that negotiated-style interruptions were superior to immediate-style interruptions in several issues of importance to end-user debugging, and further suggest that a reason for this superiority may be that immediate-style interruptions encourage different debugging strategies.

REFERENCES

• 1: Bailey, B.P., Konstan, J.A., and Carlis, J.V. Measuring the effects of interruptions on task performance in the user interface. IEEE Proc. Conf. Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (2000), 757--762.
• 2: Burmistrov, I. and Leonova, A. Do interrupted users work faster or slower? The micro-analysis of computerized text editing task. Human-Computer Interaction: Theory and Practice (Part I) - Proc. HCI International 2003, Vol. 1. (J. Jacko and C. Stephanidis, eds.) Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, NJ, 2003, 621--625.
• 3: Margaret Burnett , John Atwood , Rebecca Walpole Djang , James Reichwein , Herkimer Gottfried , Sherry Yang, Forms/3: A first-order visual language to explore the boundaries of the spreadsheet paradigm, Journal of Functional Programming, v.11 n.2, p.155-206, March 2001
• 4: Margaret Burnett , Curtis Cook , Omkar Pendse , Gregg Rothermel , Jay Summet , Chris Wallace, End-user software engineering with assertions in the spreadsheet paradigm, Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Software Engineering, May 03-10, 2003, Portland, Oregon
• 5: John M. Carroll, The Nurnberg funnel: designing minimalist instruction for practical computer skill, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1990
• 6: Albert T. Corbett , John R. Anderson, Locus of feedback control in computer-based tutoring: impact on learning rate, achievement and attitudes, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, p.245-252, March 2001, Seattle, Washington, United States [doi>10.1145/365024.365111]
• 7: Czerwinski, M., Cutrell, E., and Horvitz, E. Instant messaging: Effects of relevance and time. People and Computers XIV: Proc. HCI 2000, Vol. 2 (S. Turner and P. Turner, eds.), British Computer Society, 2000, 71--76.
• 8: Marc Fisher , Mingming Cao , Gregg Rothermel , Curtis R. Cook , Margaret M. Burnett, Automated test case generation for spreadsheets, Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Software Engineering, May 19-25, 2002, Orlando, Florida [doi>10.1145/581339.581359]
• 9: Hess, S., Detweiler, M. Training to reduce the disruptive effects of interruptions. Proc. Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Mtg. (1994), 1173--1177.
• 10: Scott Hudson , James Fogarty , Christopher Atkeson , Daniel Avrahami , Jodi Forlizzi , Sara Kiesler , Johnny Lee , Jie Yang, Predicting human interruptibility with sensors: a Wizard of Oz feasibility study, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, April 05-10, 2003, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, USA [doi>10.1145/642611.642657]
• 11: Ko, A.J. and Myers, B.A. Development and evaluation of a model of programming errors. Proc. IEEE Symp. Human-Centric Computing Languages and Environments (2003), 7--14.
• 12: Andrew J. Ko , Brad A. Myers, Designing the whyline: a debugging interface for asking questions about program behavior, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, p.151-158, April 24-29, 2004, Vienna, Austria [doi>10.1145/985692.985712]
• 13: Mathan, S. and Koedinger, K. Recasting the feedback debate: Benefits of tutoring error detecting and correction skill. Int. Conf. Artificial Intell. Education (2003).
• 14: McFarlane, D.C. Comparison of four primary methods for coordinating the interruption of people in human-computer interaction. Human-Computer Interaction 17, 1 (2002), 63--139.
• 15: Robert C. Miller , Brad A. Myers, Outlier finding: focusing user attention on possible errors, Proceedings of the 14th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology, November 11-14, 2001, Orlando, Florida [doi>10.1145/502348.502361]
• 16: Pongched, P. A More Complex Model of Relevancy in Interruptions. Human-Computer Interaction Capstone, School of Computer Science, DePaul University, Chicago, IL (2003). http://www.spong.org/~pechluck/HCI/content-of-interruptions.pdf
• 17: J. Ruthruff , E. Creswick , M. Burnett , C. Cook , S. Prabhakararao , M. Fisher, II , M. Main, End-user software visualizations for fault localization, Proceedings of the 2003 ACM symposium on Software visualization, June 11-13, 2003, San Diego, California [doi>10.1145/774833.774851]
• 18: Cheri Speier , Joseph S. Valacich , Iris Vessey, The effects of task interruption and information presentation on individual decision making, Proceedings of the eighteenth international conference on Information systems, p.21-36, December 14-17, 1997, Atlanta, Georgia, United States
• 19: Earl Wagner , Henry Lieberman, An end-user tool for e-commerce debugging, Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces, January 12-15, 2003, Miami, Florida, USA [doi>10.1145/604045.604124]
• 20: Aaron Wilson , Margaret Burnett , Laura Beckwith , Orion Granatir , Ledah Casburn , Curtis Cook , Mike Durham , Gregg Rothermel, Harnessing curiosity to increase correctness in end-user programming, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, April 05-10, 2003, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, USA [doi>10.1145/642611.642665]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.1 PROGRAMMING TECHNIQUES
      D.1.7 Visual Programming

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.4 Software/Program Verification
          Subjects: Validation
      D.2.6 Programming Environments
          Subjects: Interactive environments

  H. Information Systems
  H.1 MODELS AND PRINCIPLES
      H.1.2 User/Machine Systems
          Subjects: Software psychology
  H.4 INFORMATION SYSTEMS APPLICATIONS
      H.4.1 Office Automation
          Subjects: Spreadsheets
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)

General Terms:
Human Factors, Languages

Keywords:
debugging, end-user programming, end-user software engineering, interruptions, surprise-explain-reward