How Software Developers Mitigate Their Errors When Developing Code

Nagaria, Bhaveet; Hall, Tracy

doi:10.1109/tse.2020.3040554

Cited by 16 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 64 publications

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“…We find that Package management tool usage is the most dominant underlying cause for all three PMs, confirming that end-users report technical issues on Package management tool usage and not on specific migrations of dependencies. The result is consistent with previous studies [16]- [20]. They reported that the complexity of software tools [16], installability of tools and packages [17]- [20] are the root causes of the endusers struggle during application development and mainte-Fig.…”

Section: Underlying Causes Of Pm Issues (Rq 2 )supporting

confidence: 92%

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An Empirical Study of Package Management Issues via Stack Overflow

Islam

Kula

Chinthanet

et al. 2023

IEICE Trans. Inf. & Syst.

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The package manager (PM) is crucial to most technology stacks, acting as a broker to ensure that a verified dependency package is correctly installed, configured, or removed from an application. Diversity in technology stacks has led to dozens of PMs with various features. While our recent study indicates that package management features of PM are related to end-user experiences, it is unclear what those issues are and what information is required to resolve them. In this paper, we have investigated PM issues faced by end-users through an empirical study of content on Stack Overflow (SO). We carried out a qualitative analysis of 1,131 questions and their accepted answer posts for three popular PMs (i.e., Maven, npm, and NuGet ) to identify issue types, underlying causes, and their resolutions. Our results confirm that end-users struggle with PM tool usage (approximately 64-72%). We observe that most issues are raised by end-users due to lack of instructions and errors messages from PM tools. In terms of issue resolution, we find that external link sharing is the most common practice to resolve PM issues. Additionally, we observe that links pointing to useful resources (i.e., official documentation websites, tutorials, etc.) are most frequently shared, indicating the potential for tool support and the ability to provide relevant information for PM end-users.

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Section: Underlying Causes Of Pm Issues (Rq 2 )supporting

confidence: 92%

“…The result is consistent with previous studies [16]- [20]. They reported that the complexity of software tools [16], installability of tools and packages [17]- [20] are the root causes of the endusers struggle during application development and mainte-Fig. 3 Percentage of PM issues by their underlying cause.…”

Section: Underlying Causes Of Pm Issues (Rq 2 )supporting

confidence: 91%

An Empirical Study of Package Management Issues via Stack Overflow

Islam

Kula

Chinthanet

et al. 2023

IEICE Trans. Inf. & Syst.

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“…Anu, Hu, Carver, Walia, and Bradshaw [62] focused on using a human error taxonomy to improve quality of requirements. Their research also found that students who received training on human error taxonomy wrote requirements with fewer defects [63] Nagaria and Hall [64] recently interviewed developers about the situations of the skill-based errors and how they mitigate such errors.…”

Section: B Human Error Cause Of Software Defectsmentioning

confidence: 97%

HEDF: A Method for Early Forecasting Software Defects Based on Human Error Mechanisms

Huang

Strigini

2023

IEEE Access

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As the primary cause of software defects, human error is the key to understanding, and perhaps to forecasting and avoiding defects. Little research has been done to forecast defects on the basis of the cognitive errors that cause them. The existing ''defect prediction'' models are applied to code once it has been produced: therefore, their ''predictions'' have little implications for preventing the defects. This paper proposes an approach, ''Human-Error-based Defect Forecast'' (HEDF), to forecasting the exact defects at early stages of software development, before the code is produced, through knowledge about the cognitive mechanisms that cause developers' errors. This approach is based on a model of human error mechanisms underlying software defects: a defect is caused by an error-prone scenario triggering human error modes, which psychologists have observed to recur across diverse activities. Software defects can then be forecast by identifying such error-prone scenarios the in requirements and/or design documents. We assessed this approach empirically, with 55 programmers in a programming competition and four representative analysts serving as the users of the approach. Impressively, the approach was able to forecast, at the requirement phase, 75.7% of the defects later committed by all of the programmers. When considering just the defect forms, which may manifest as distinct defects even in the same program, the proposed method predicted 31.8% of them. This approach substantially improved the defect forecasting performances for analysts of various expertise, with a minimum of 100% improvement, compared to forecasts without the approach. If the forecast had been used to prevent the defects, it could have saved an estimated 46.2% of the debugging effort and increased the fraction of programmers delivering an acceptable program by 32.6%. The observed excellent performance of HEDF in forecasting (early at requirement stage) the exact forms and locations of defects that may be later introduced by developers into code makes it a promising candidate for preventing the defects, worthy of further study.

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“…The adoption of process improvement models, such as the Capability Maturity Model (CMM), could also deliver the fault prevention effect [4,10]. On the basis of Human Error Theory (HET) [11], Nagaria and Hall interviewed 27 professional software developers about what human errors software developers make and how they mitigate such errors [12]. They found that developers predominately rely on trying to improve their own willpower to concentrate better on coding tasks and mitigate errors.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Requirements‐related fault prevention during the transformation from formal specifications to programs

Liu

2023

IET Software

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Software faults are costly to find and remove from programs. It is better to avoid inserting the faults in the first place. The authors identify requirements‐related faults that can arise during the transformation of formal specifications into programs, analyse each to discover its causes, and propose corresponding fault prevention methods. The approach works by analysing a specification, decomposing it into specification fragments with different levels like components, determining the correct implementation order among the components, and enabling automated code generation for the components and other low‐level specification fragments. The approach seeks to reduce the faults in programs significantly by guiding programmers to work effectively and productively. The authors evaluate the approach's performance experimentally and compare it to the performance of a fault‐prevention method with industry applications.

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How Software Developers Mitigate Their Errors When Developing Code

Cited by 16 publications

References 64 publications

An Empirical Study of Package Management Issues via Stack Overflow

An Empirical Study of Package Management Issues via Stack Overflow

HEDF: A Method for Early Forecasting Software Defects Based on Human Error Mechanisms

Requirements‐related fault prevention during the transformation from formal specifications to programs

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