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The growing need for automated and personalized feedback in programming education has led to recent interest in leveraging generative AI for feedback generation. However, current approaches tend to rely on prompt engineering techniques in…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2025-09-16 Victor-Alexandru Pădurean , Tung Phung , Nachiket Kotalwar , Michael Liut , Juho Leinonen , Paul Denny , Adish Singla

Large Language Models (LLMs) often generate code with subtle but critical bugs, especially for complex tasks. Existing automated repair methods typically rely on superficial pass/fail signals, offering limited visibility into program…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Jiangping Huang , Wenguang Ye , Weisong Sun , Jian Zhang , Mingyue Zhang , Yang Liu

This study investigated the essential of meaningful automated feedback for programming assignments. Three different types of feedback were tested, including (a) What's wrong - what test cases were testing and which failed, (b) Gap -…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2019-10-09 Qiang Hao , Jack P Wilson , Camille Ottaway , Naitra Iriumi , Kai Arakawa , David H Smith

Timely and high-quality feedback is essential for effective learning in programming courses; yet, providing such support at scale remains a challenge. While AI-based systems offer scalable and immediate help, their responses can…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Tung Phung , Heeryung Choi , Mengyan Wu , Christopher Brooks , Sumit Gulwani , Adish Singla

Correctness is one of the more important criteria of qualitative software. However, it is often taught in isolation and most students consider it only as an afterthought. They also do not receive sufficient feedback on code quality and…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-12-03 Steffen Dick , Christoph Bockisch , Harrie Passier , Lex Bijlsma , Ruurd Kuiper

Debugging is a demanding aspect of programming yet guidance on how to teach it effectively remains limited. Novices often struggle to recognize impasses regulate their problem solving and manage cognitive load and stress. This study…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Anahita Golrang , Kshitij Sharma

Due to increasingly complex software design and rapid iterative development, code defects and security vulnerabilities are prevalent in modern software. In response, programmers rely on static analysis tools to regularly scan their…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-03-21 Anant Kharkar , Roshanak Zilouchian Moghaddam , Matthew Jin , Xiaoyu Liu , Xin Shi , Colin Clement , Neel Sundaresan

App stores allow users to give valuable feedback on apps, and developers to find this feedback and use it for the software evolution. However, finding user feedback that matches existing bug reports in issue trackers is challenging as users…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-02-16 Marlo Häring , Christoph Stanik , Walid Maalej

Background: Code review is a cognitively demanding and time-consuming process. Previous qualitative studies hinted at how decomposing change sets into multiple yet internally coherent ones would improve the reviewing process. So far,…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2020-01-22 Marco di Biase , Magiel Bruntink , Arie van Deursen , Alberto Bacchelli

Background. Defect prediction has been a highly active topic among researchers in the Empirical Software Engineering field. Previous literature has successfully achieved the most accurate prediction of an incoming fault and identified the…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Mikel Robredo , Matteo Esposito , Fabio Palomba , Rafael Peñaloza , Valentina Lenarduzzi

Currently, programming instructors continually face the problem of helping to debug students' programs. Although there currently exist a number of debuggers and debugging tools in various platforms, most of these projects or products are…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2009-10-02 Abdullah Mohd Zin , Syed Ahmad Aljunid , Zarina Shukur , Mohd Jan Nordin

Debugging of large software systems consisting of many processes accessing shared resources is a very difficult task. Many commercial systems record essential events during system execution for post-mortem analysis. However, the event…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2007-05-23 Raymond Smith , Bogdan Korel

Specifications for code writing tasks are usually expressed in natural language and may be ambiguous. Programmers must therefore develop the ability to recognize ambiguities in task specifications and resolve them by asking clarifying…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-08-21 Aditey Nandan , Viraj Kumar

Automated feedback generation plays a crucial role in enhancing personalized learning experiences in computer science education. Among different types of feedback, next-step hint feedback is particularly important, as it provides students…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Anastasiia Birillo , Aleksei Rostovskii , Yaroslav Golubev , Hieke Keuning

We conducted a systematic literature review on automated grading and feedback tools for programming education. We analysed 121 research papers from 2017 to 2021 inclusive and categorised them based on skills assessed, approach, language…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-12-11 Marcus Messer , Neil C. C. Brown , Michael Kölling , Miaojing Shi

Artificial students -- models that simulate how learners act and respond within educational systems -- are a promising tool for evaluating tutoring strategies and feedback mechanisms at scale. However, most existing approaches rely on…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Charles Koutcheme , Juho Leinonen , Arto Hellas

Debugging physical computing projects provides a rich context to understand cross-disciplinary problem solving that integrates multiple domains of computing and engineering. Yet understanding and assessing students' learning of debugging…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2023-12-18 L. Morales-Navarro , D. A. Fields , D. Barapatre , Y. B. Kafai

Tracing back the instruction execution sequence to debug a multicore system can be very time-consuming because the relationships of the instructions can be very complex. For instructions that cannot be checked by the environment immediately…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2019-09-09 Yuzhe Luo , Xin Yu

Programs with constraints are hard to debug. In this paper, we describe a general architecture to help develop new debugging tools for constraint programming. The possible tools are fed by a single general-purpose tracer. A tracer-driver is…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2007-05-23 Ludovic Langevine , Mireille Ducasse

Many contemporary software products have subsystems for automatic crash reporting. However, it is well-known that the same bug can produce slightly different reports. To manage this problem, reports are usually grouped, often manually by…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2020-09-29 Roman Vasiliev , Dmitrij Koznov , George Chernishev , Aleksandr Khvorov , Dmitry Luciv , Nikita Povarov