An empirical analysis of debugging performance – differences between iterative and recursive constructs

An experiment involving more than 500 responses from over 250 subjects was conducted for the purpose of identifying differences in debugging performance among subjects who debugged iterative code and those who debugged recursive code. The subjects, classified as novices or experienced, based on programming experience, were asked to locate and fix a single logical bug in small segments of C code. Two different tasks – searching a linked list and copying a linked list, were used in the experiment. Statistical analyses yielded the following significant results: (i) 63.2% of all subjects located the bug in the recursive constructs compared to 41.5% for the iterative constructs ( p