A situated cognition view about the effects of planning and authorship on computer program debugging

Two experiments were conducted to investigate the relationship between planning and debugging and the effect of program authorship on debugging strategies. Three groups of participants with different programming experiences were recruited. In the first experiment, the participants were asked to develop and debug their self-generated program whereas in the second experiment, they were asked to debug an other-written program where some logical errors were planted. Situated cognition approach, being an emergent cognitive paradigm, furnishes an alternative framework to understand the problems of interest. Deweyan notion of inquiry and Gibsonian theory of affordance are of particular relevance. The results show that planning is ineffective for debugging, irrespective of the programming expertise level and program authorship. Besides, situated debugging is demonstrated to be the preferred strategy which is not significantly related to the program authorship. A model of planning for program debugging and a theory of two-faceted transparency are postulated for explicating the observations.