Debugging support for end user mashup programming
Sandeep Kaur Kuttal, Anita Sarma, Gregg Rothermel · 2013
Programming for the web can be an intimidating task, particularly for non-professional ("end-user") programmers. Mashup programming environments attempt to remedy this by providing support for such programming. It is well known, however, that mashup programmers create applications that contain bugs. Furthermore, mashup programmers learn from examples and reuse other mashups, which causes bugs to propagate to other mashups. In this paper we classify the bugs that occur in a large corpus of Yahoo! Pipes mashups. We describe support we have implemented in the Yahoo! Pipes environment to provide automatic error detection techniques that help mashup programmers localize and correct these bugs. We present the results of a think-aloud study comparing the experiences of end-user mashup programmers using and not using our support. Our results show that our debugging enhancements do help these programmers localize and correct bugs more effectively and efficiently.