Do Developers Read Compiler Error Messages?

Barik, T., Smith, J., Lubick, K., Holmes, E., Feng, J., Murphy-Hill, E., & Parnin, C. (2017). Do Developers Read Compiler Error Messages?. Proceedings of the 39th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), 575-585.

Type

Conference paper

Intellectual base

Primary research

Year

2017

Pages

575-585

DOI

10.1109/icse.2017.59

DOI registrant

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers

Link

https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSE.2017.59

Cited from

systems_cybernetics

Cited by

1 citation across 1 artifact.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Primes

• Diagnostically Inert Signal
  • Error messages: legacy compiler messages ("syntax error at line 42"), cryptic stack traces, "an error occurred" dialogs

    This sourceEye-tracking study showing developers do read error messages and that hard-to-read (uninformative) messages predict worse task performance — evidence that announcement-only diagnostics fail to equip repair.

Verification

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