[mattmanser]

The paper is almost entirely focused on incremental learning. It then throws a very brief outline about debugging at the end. What is outlined is pretty much step 5 in my list. I feel that it's twisting the actual content of the article to assert that it naturally follows that "your first tangible goal is to be reproducing because that's how a hypothesis is tested". If that was the belief, why not mention it? It really is lacking a tangible framework for entering a debugging mindset.

The words recreate or replicate don't appear in the article. Reproduce is used once at the bottom of the article in relation to the actual advice ("so it seems like the bug has been reproduced at this point"), and once tangentially in the discussion about tools. How can there be a discussion about a debugging mindset without those words?

As for step 4 coming before step 1? I feel talking about one month in an entire career is moving the goal posts. The abstract talks about how much time all programmers spend debugging, with no talk about the first month of a programmers career. And it talks about teaching debugging, a mindset to put in place before that first job.

That is what my steps were attempting to describe, a method for teaching how to enter a debugging mindset.

[dhodell]

Yes, the paper is almost entirely focused on learning because it is a paper about applying somewhat recent research in social psychology into the area of debugging. It is not a paper about debugging. I can see how you might be disappointed if you expected a paper on debugging, but that is not what this is, and it says so at the top, in bold letters, above the abstract.

Anyway, I disagree with the rest of the points you make here, but I don't really feel like arguing about things that my paper is not (and was not) intended to be. I'm sorry you couldn't get much out of it, and thank you again for your feedback!