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Supplemental Materials for "AutoPrint: Judging the Effectiveness of An Automatic Print Statement Debugging Tool"

dataset
posted on 2025-07-29, 17:07 authored by Minhyuk KoMinhyuk Ko
<p dir="ltr">Debugging is one of the most difficult and tedious tasks for software engineers. While various tools and techniques have been introduced to assist debugging, most programmers use print statement debugging to find and fix errors in their code. That is, they manually add code to print values to verify if the code is executing as expected and make sure a certain section of the program is reached. However, this process can be time-consuming and error-prone, especially in large and complex programs. To that end, we introduce AutoPrint, a tool that automatically inserts and removes print statements to streamline print statement debugging in Java code. We conducted a judgment study with 23 participants---students and practitioners---to elicit feedback on AutoPrint and gain insights on its utility in practical debugging tasks. Our results show participants perceive AutoPrint saves debugging time and effort through a faster, simpler, and more usable tool compared to other approaches. However, ideally programmers should adopt more advanced automated debugging techniques to debug their code. Based on our findings, we provide implications for print statement debugging in development workflows and motivate the design of human-centric tools to enhance how programmers debug code.</p><p dir="ltr">In this dataset, the word <i>code</i> refers to labels or tags assigned to segments of qualitative data to summarize or categorize their meaning.</p>

History

Corresponding Author Name

Minhyuk Ko

Corresponding Author E-mail Address

minhyukko@vt.edu

Files/Folders in Dataset and Description

[InterviewQuestions.txt] - Questions that we asked during the Zoom interview sessions. [SurveyQuestions.pdf] - Pre-survey instrument that we used to screen participants prior to the interview. [SurveyResults.csv] - Anonymized results that we obtained from the survey.

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    Computer Science

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