Do Developers Read Compiler Error Messages?

被引：68

作者：

Barik, Titus ^{[1
]}

Smith, Justin ^{[1
]}

Lubick, Kevin ^{[1
]}

Holmes, Elisabeth ^{[3
]}

Feng, Jing ^{[2
]}

Murphy-Hill, Emerson ^{[1
]}

Parnin, Chris ^{[1
]}

机构：

[1] North Carolina State Univ, Dept Comp Sci, Raleigh, NC 27695 USA

[2] North Carolina State Univ, Dept Psychol, Raleigh, NC USA

[3] Washington & Lee Univ, Dept Psychol, Lexington, VA 24450 USA

来源：

2017 IEEE/ACM 39TH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON SOFTWARE ENGINEERING (ICSE) | 2017年

基金：

美国国家科学基金会;

关键词：

compiler errors; eye tracking; integrated development environments; programmer comprehension; reading; visual attention; EYE-MOVEMENTS;

D O I：

10.1109/ICSE.2017.59

中图分类号：

TP31 [计算机软件];

学科分类号：

081202 ; 0835 ;

摘要：

In integrated development environments, developers receive compiler error messages through a variety of textual and visual mechanisms, such as popups and wavy red underlines. Although error messages are the primary means of communicating defects to developers, researchers have a limited understanding on how developers actually use these messages to resolve defects. To understand how developers use error messages, we conducted an eye tracking study with 56 participants from undergraduate and graduate software engineering courses at our university. The participants attempted to resolve common, yet problematic defects in a Java code base within the Eclipse development environment. We found that: 1) participants read error messages and the difficulty of reading these messages is comparable to the difficulty of reading source code, 2) difficulty reading error messages significantly predicts participants' task performance, and 3) participants allocate a substantial portion of their total task to reading error messages (13%-25%). The results of our study offer empirical justification for the need to improve compiler error messages for developers.

引用

页码：575 / 585

页数：11

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