Impact of interruption style on end-user debugging

Abstract

Although researchers have begun to explicitly support end-user programmers' debugging by providing information to help them find bugs, there is little research addressing the proper mechanism to alert the user to this information. The choice of alerting mechanism can be important, because as previous research has shown, different interruption styles have different potential advantages and disadvantages. To explore impacts of interruptions in the end-user debugging domain, this paper describes an empirical comparison of two interruption styles that have been used to alert end-user programmers to debugging information. Our results show that negotiated-style interruptions were superior to immediate-style interruptions in several issues of importance to end-user debugging, and further suggest that a reason for this superiority may be that immediate-style interruptions encourage different debugging strategies.