Designing a Support Tool for API Debugging

Coding often relies on Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), yet APIs are hard to learn, use, and debug. Debugging is a notoriously difficult skill, and is made even more challenging by the complexities of APIs. Yet, little work has focused on support for debugging code that relies on an API. In this poster, we present an early design of debugging worked examples to support programmers in debugging an unfamiliar API. In our formative study, novices could access the information through a prototype tool. This works-in-progress presents preliminary data about programmers' use of this tool and the implications for future work.