Curtis Cook
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Publications by Curtis Cook (bibliography)
» 2006 «
Beckwith, Laura, Kissinger, Cory, Burnett, Margaret, Wiedenbeck, Susan, Lawrance, Joseph, Blackwell, Alan and Cook, Curtis (2006): Tinkering and gender in end-user programmers' debugging. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2006 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2006. pp. 231-240. Available online
“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.”
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» 2005 «
Beckwith, Laura, Burnett, Margaret, Wiedenbeck, Susan, Cook, Curtis, Sorte, Shraddha and Hastings, Michelle (2005): Effectiveness of end-user debugging software features: are there gender issues?. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2005 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2005. pp. 869-878. Available online
“Although gender differences in a technological world are receiving significant research attention, much of the research and practice has aimed at how society and education can impact the successes and retention of female computer science professionals-but the possibility of gender issues within software has received almost no attention. If gender issues exist with some types of software features, it is possible that accommodating them by changing these features can increase effectiveness, but only if we know what these issues are. In this paper, we empirically investigate gender differences for end users in the context of debugging spreadsheets. Our results uncover significant gender differences in self-efficacy and feature acceptance, with females exhibiting lower self-efficacy and lower feature acceptance. The results also show that these differences can significantly reduce females' effectiveness.”
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» 2004 «
Robertson, T. J., Prabhakararao, Shrinu, Burnett, Margaret, Cook, Curtis, Ruthruff, Joseph R., Beckwith, Laura and Phalgune, Amit (2004): Impact of interruption style on end-user debugging. In: Dykstra-Erickson, Elizabeth and Tscheligi, Manfred (eds.) Proceedings of ACM CHI 2004 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems April 24-29, 2004, Vienna, Austria. pp. 287-294. Available online
“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.”
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» 2003 «
Wilson, Aaron, Burnett, Margaret, Beckwith, Laura, Granatir, Orion, Casburn, Ledah, Cook, Curtis, Durham, Mike and Rothermel, Gregg (2003): Harnessing curiosity to increase correctness in end-user programming. In: Cockton, Gilbert and Korhonen, Panu (eds.) Proceedings of the ACM CHI 2003 Human Factors in Computing Systems Conference April 5-10, 2003, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, USA. pp. 305-312.
» 1997 «
Wilcox, E. M., Atwood, J. W., Burnett, Margaret, Cadiz, Jonathan J. and Cook, Curtis (1997): Does Continuous Visual Feedback Aid Debugging in Direct-Manipulation Programming Systems?. In: Pemberton, Steven (ed.) Proceedings of the ACM CHI 97 Human Factors in Computing Systems Conference March 22-27, 1997, Atlanta, Georgia. pp. 258-265. Available online
“Continuous visual feedback is becoming a common feature in direct-manipulation programming systems of all kinds -- from demonstrational macro builders to spreadsheet packages to visual programming languages featuring direct manipulation. But does continuous visual feedback actually help in the domain of programming? There has been little investigation of this question, and what evidence there is from related domains points in conflicting directions. To advance what is known about this issue, we conducted an empirical study to determine whether the inclusion of continuous visual feedback into a direct-manipulation programming system helps with one particular task: debugging. Our results were that although continuous visual feedback did not significantly help with debugging in general, it did significantly help with debugging in some circumstances. Our results also indicate three factors that may help determine those circumstances.”
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Cook, Curtis, Burnett, Margaret and Boom, Derrick (1997): A Bug's Eye View of Immediate Visual Feedback in Direct-Manipulation Programming Systems. In: Empirical Studies of Programmers - Seventh Workshop October 24-26, 1997, 1997, Alexandria, Virginia. pp. 20-41. Available online
“Immediate visual feedback is becoming a common feature in direct-manipulation programming systems of all kinds -- from demonstrational macro builders to spreadsheet packages to visual programming languages featuring direct manipulation. But does immediate visual feedback actually help in the domain of programming? We previously reported on an empirical study to determine whether the inclusion of immediate visual feedback into a direct-manipulation programming system helps with one particular task: debugging. In that study, subjects debugged programs with and without immediate visual feedback. We found that although immediate visual feedback did not significantly help with debugging in general, it did significantly help with debugging in some circumstances. In this paper, we follow up on those results, looking at attributes of the bugs themselves to see if they help to determine the circumstances in which feedback helps with debugging. We analyze how particular bugs and collections of bugs grouped by error type related to subjects' debugging abilities with and without immediate visual feedback, which we term the "which" questions; how bugs' position on the screen related to subjects' debugging abilities with and without immediate visual feedback, termed the "where" questions; and whether the presence or absence of immediate visual feedback affected the speed and order in which bugs were corrected, termed the "when" questions. The results show that a bug's error type and screen position were together a strong predictor of whether feedback would aid in identifying and correcting it, and that these two factors also significantly influenced how feedback affected the speed and order in which the bugs were corrected.”
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» 1993 «
Cook, Curtis, Scholtz, Jean and Spohrer, James C. (eds.) Empirical Studies of Programmers - Fifth Workshop December 3-15, 1993, 1993, Palo Alto, California.
» 1991 «
Gellenbeck, Edward M. and Cook, Curtis (1991): An Investigation of Procedure and Variable Names as Beacons during Program Comprehension. In: Koenemann-Belliveau, Jurgen, Moher, Thomas G. and Robertson, Scott P. (eds.) Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Workshop on Empirical Studies of Programmers 1991, Norwood, New Jersey, USA. pp. 65-81.
“Beacons are defined as sets of key features that typically indicate the presence of a particular data structure or operation. It has been claimed that programmers use them to help comprehend an unfamiliar program. However, despite their importance, beacons are not well-defined and very few have been identified. The present study investigated the importance of procedure and variable names as beacons during comprehension of short Pascal procedures. Ninety-six college seniors and graduate computer science students studied versions of a binary search and sorting procedures for one minute each and then provided a written description of the functions of each procedure. It was found that both meaningful procedure and variable names served as beacons to high-level comprehension. However, a strong code beacon, like the swap operation in a sorting routine, was found to be relied on more than the procedure name for high-level comprehension.”
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Gellenbeck, Edward M. and Cook, Curtis (1991): Does Signaling Help Professional Programmers Read and Understand Computer Programs?. In: Koenemann-Belliveau, Jurgen, Moher, Thomas G. and Robertson, Scott P. (eds.) Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Workshop on Empirical Studies of Programmers 1991, Norwood, New Jersey, USA. pp. 82-98.
“Signaling refers to the addition of non-content information to a text in order to emphasize certain ideas and/or clarify the organization. There is increased interest in using typographic signaling, such as boldface type, different font sizes and ruled lines, to format computer program source code listings. However, little evidence exists to show that this type of formatting makes programs easier to read and understand. The present study reports on a controlled experiment which investigated the effectiveness of typographic signaling, header comments before modules, and mnemonic module names as ways to aid comprehension. We found that while all three factors helped experienced programmers confirm hypotheses about a 913-line program, only the header comments and mnemonic names helped the programmers locate material in the program. We also found only modest improvements in comprehension when typographic signaling was used with header comments and mnemonic names.”
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» 1987 «
Nanja, Murthi and Cook, Curtis (1987): An Analysis of the On-Line Debugging Process. In: Olson, Gary M., Sheppard, Sylvia B. and Soloway, Elliot (eds.) Empirical Studies of Programmers - Second Workshop December 7-8 1987, 1987, Washington, DC. pp. 172-184.
“This paper reports the results of a protocol study that compared the debugging process of expert, intermediate, and novice student programmers. Subjects used a microcomputer to debug a Pascal program with three semantic and three logic errors. The following performance differences were identified: (1) Experts employed a comprehension approach in which they first attempted to understand the program and then used this knowledge for finding the bugs. Intermediates and novices employed an isolation approach in which they immediately attempted to identify candidate bug locations by searching the output for clues, recalling similar bugs, and testing program states. (2) Experts corrected multiple errors before verifying the corrections while intermediates and novices corrected and verified single errors. Intermediates and novices corrected the semantic errors first and then the logic errors while experts corrected both semantic and logic errors at the same time. (3) Experts were the fastest and most successful in correcting all of the errors, modified fewer statements, and did not introduce more errors. Most of the novice did not correct all of the errors, made very extensive modifications and introduced many new errors. Most intermediates corrected all of the errors but they made considerable modifications and introduced several new errors.”
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Mar 17th, 2010
Changes to this page (author)
17 Feb 2010: Enabled abstracts to be shown on Curtis Cook's author page.29 Jun 2007: Author was edited 19 Jun 2007: Author was edited
28 Apr 2003: Added the author to the bibliography
