Enhancing Novice Programmers’ Debugging Skills Through Systematic Education: A Comparative Study

In the field of software development, debugging is a crucial yet challenging skill, particularly for novice programmers. This study evaluates the efficacy of systematic debugging education in enhancing students’ debugging skills through two experimental phases. The first experiment involved 31 CS II students tackling debugging problems without prior instruction. The second experiment involved a different group of 59 students who received structured debugging instruction before engaging with similar debugging problems. The research aims to address the differences in debugging performance before and after the introduction of systematic debugging strategies, and the specific challenges faced by novice programmers in identifying and fixing various types of bugs. The results indicate significant improvements post-instruction, with the median correctness level rising from 60% to 80% and the median time to complete tasks decreasing from 28.7 minutes to 10.7 minutes. Further analysis revealed that certain bugs, such as division by integers and misusing switch statements, posed greater challenges initially but showed marked improvement post-instruction. This study underscores the transformative impact of systematic debugging education on novice programmers, enhancing both their accuracy and efficiency in debugging tasks.