There has been little research into how end-user programming environments can provide explanations that could fill a critical information gap for end-user debuggers - help with debugging strategy. To address this need, we designed and prototyped a video-based approach for explaining debugging strategy, and accompanied it with a text-only approach. We then conducted a qualitative empirical study with end-user debuggers. The results reveal the influences of the explanations on end-user debuggers' decision making, how users reacted to the video versus textual media, and the information gaps the explanations closed. The results also reveal issues of particular importance to explanations of this type.

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 right content to communicate to these users. The specific semantic content of these debugging communications matters because, if the users are not actually seeking the information the system is providing, they are not likely to attend to it. This paper reports a formative empirical study that sheds light on what end users actually want to know in the course of debugging a spreadsheet, given the availability of a set of interactive visual testing and debugging features. Our results provide in sights into end-user debuggers' information gaps, and further suggest opportunities to improve end-user debugging systems' support for the things end-user debuggers actually want to know.

Earlier research on gender effects with software features intended to help problem-solvers in end-user debugging environments has shown that females are less likely to use unfamiliar software features. This poses a serious problem because these features may be key to helping them with debugging problems. Contrasting this with research documenting males' inclination for tinkering in unfamiliar environments, the question arises as to whether encouraging tinkering with new features would help females overcome the factors, such as low self-efficacy, that led to the earlier results. In this paper, we present an experiment with males and females in an end-user debugging setting, and investigate how tinkering behavior impacts several measures of their debugging success. Our results show that the factors of tinkering, reflection, and self-efficacy, can combine in multiple ways to impact debugging effectiveness differently for males than for females.

Research in learning theory has aided designers of help systems in determining education-oriented ways to present information. Many of these explanation approaches for assisting users in computing tasks remain primarily text-based. By incorporating learning theory ideas into our existing text-based explanation approach supplemented with visualizations, we hope to enhance not only the learning of but also the productivity of end users.

End-user programmers, because they are human, make mistakes. However, past research has not considered how visual end-user debugging devices could be designed to ameliorate the effects of mistakes. This paper empirically examines oracle mistakes - mistakes users make about which values are right and which are wrong - to reveal differences in how different types of oracle mistakes impact the quality of visual feedback about bugs. We then consider the implications of these empirical results for designers of end-user software engineering environments.