Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

acceptedVersion

Publication Date

9-2019

Abstract

Background: Compilers tend to produce cryptic and uninformative error messages, leaving programmers confused and requiring them to spend precious time to resolve the underlying error. To find help, programmers often take to online question-and-answer forums such as Stack Overflow to start discussion threads about the errors they encountered.Aims: We conjecture that information from Stack Overflow threads which discuss compiler errors can be automatically collected and repackaged to provide programmers with enhanced compiler error messages, thus saving programmers' time and energy.Method: We present Pycee, a plugin integrated with the popular Sublime Text IDE to provide enhanced compiler error messages for the Python programming language. Pycee automatically queries Stack Overflow to provide customised and summarised information within the IDE. We evaluated two Pycee variants through a think-aloud user study during which 16 programmers completed Python programming tasks while using Pycee.Results: The majority of participants agreed that Pycee was helpful while completing the study tasks. When compared to a baseline relying on the official Python documentation to enhance compiler error messages, participants generally preferred Pycee in terms of helpfulness, citing concrete suggestions for fixes and example code as major benefits.Conclusions: Our results confirm that data from online sources such as Stack Overflow can be successfully used to automatically enhance compiler error messages. Our work opens up venues for future work to further enhance compiler error messages as well as to automatically reuse content from Stack Overflow for other aspects of programming.

Keywords

Compiler errors, Stack Overflow, think-aloud

Discipline

Software Engineering

Research Areas

Software and Cyber-Physical Systems

Publication

Proceedings of the 13th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement, Porto de Galinhas, Brazil, 2019 September 19-20

First Page

1

Last Page

12

ISBN

9781728129686

Identifier

10.1109/ESEM.2019.8870155

Publisher

IEEE Computer Society

City or Country

Porto de Galinhas, Brazil

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1109/ESEM.2019.8870155

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