An Experimental Investigation of Software Error Detection by Students

AbstractCorrective or repair maintenance is fixing bugs in programs and is a costly process in both software maintenance and software development. Novice programmers are usually not taught any general strategy for debugging; rather they rely on trial and error methods. This research centered on synthesizing previous research into a syntactic /semantic instrument. A secondary purpose was to use this instrument to determine an error taxonomy and move toward a theoretical framework of error complexity that could be used as a guide in training.