I’m working on a computer science exercise and need an explanation to help me learn.

Have you ever felt that there is a disconnect between scholarly research and practical application? While this research took place quite a while ago, Parnin and Orso (2011) identified that in thirty years of scholarly research on debugging programming code there were five research papers with human participants to test the theories.

Think about that for a minute. How do you generate research results without testing it with analysis? What constitutes testing?

• For this week’s discussion find a scholarly research article available in the University of the Cumberlands’ library and less than 10 years old.
• The article you identify must include research that is practically applicable. (The research article cannot be theoretical in nature.)
• The research must include everything you would need in order to repeat the research.
• The research must include testing the research with participants. The participants cannot be the authors of the article. For example, the five research articles Parnin and Orso (2011) identified in their research. The participants do not need to be people; they could be parts, equipment, or products.

Once you find this scholarly research article discuss the following in your post:

• Briefly identify the objective of the research in the selected article.
• How was the data tested? What are the assumptions of this test? Are the assumptions defined and discussed in the article? Were there enough participants to make the results meaningful?
• What is it about this research that separates it from research that does not include participants?
• In the context of the research article, discuss the impact of applied research in terms of generalizability. Does the reduced generalizability reduce the importance of this applied research? Why or why not? What is the generalizability of this research?

When replying to your peers, include whether or not you felt that the article your peer discusses includes sufficient information to repeat the research.

Include all references used in creating each post in APA 7. Make your initial post by Wednesday at midnight, eastern time. Reply to at least two of your peers by Sunday.

Ensure that your peer responses are engaging and promote discussion. Since one of the objectives of this forum is specifically to discuss research in your peer responses, do not forget to cite and reference the article your peer discusses in their initial post.

Example post:

Objective:

The objective of the research conducted by Parnin and Orso (2011) is to understand the effectiveness of a debugging tool when programmers use it to validate and correct faults in programming code.

Test method, assumptions, sample size

After conducting the experiments, the data was tested with a two-tailed t-test (Panrin & Orso, 2011). The researchers did not identify if the data met the statistical assumptions of the t-test: the assumption of normality, the assumption of homogeneity of variance, and the assumption of independence (Sauro & Lewis, 2016, Chapter 5).

The between groups or two-tailed t-test is a method of analysis that includes the sample size in it’s calculation, therefore should meaningful results be determined with this method of analysis, the sample size would be sufficient (Sauro & Lewis, 2016, Chapter 5). Parnin and Orso (2011) evaluated the groups for a significant difference to test each of the hypotheses. There were several tests, the first two discussed in Parnin and Orso’s work are discussed:

1) Experts debug faster with debugging software with Tetris – t-test did not identify a significant difference between groups, (evidence fails to reject the null hypothesis; Parnin & Orso, 2011, para.5.1)

2) Experts debug faster with debugging software with NanoXML – results were significant (Parnin & Orso, 2011, para. 5.1)

What makes this applied research necessary for this topic?

Debugging programming code is an human and machine interactive process when using a debugging tool. To my knowledge, no one has successfully created completely autonomous debugging software. Therefore, theoretical concepts or author-tested research is not capable of capturing the immense amount of possibilities and complexity of human behavioral research.

Generalizability: impact of applied research, importance, and extension of this research

The generalizability of Parnin & Orso’s (2011) research is minimal; it does not extend beyond this research sample. The sample only included graduate students, so reasonably these results cannot be extended to apply to all programmers. Only two different programs were analyzed, with one debugging tool. Therefore it is not reasonably extensible to all or even more programming languages. That same limitation in external validity exists for the debugging tool; this article’s results are not generalizable to all debugging software.

This style of research is formally referred to as applied research. Theoretical and applied research are both essential to broadening a field of knowledge. The generalizability of applied research is significantly reduced when compared to the theoretical concept. However, applied research is particularly beneficial in a practical environment (de Gooyert & Größler, 2019). While this research does not extend beyond this study, it does generate numerous opportunities for future research.

de Gooyert, V., & Größler, A. (2018). On the differences between theoretical and applied system dynamics modeling. System Dynamics Review, 34(4), 575-583. https://dx.doi.org/10.1002/sdr.1617

Parnin, C., & Orso, A. (2011, July). Are automated debugging techniques actually helping programmers? In Proceedings of the 2011 international symposium on software testing and analysis (pp. 199-209). https://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2001420

Sauro, J., & Lewis, J. R. (2016). Is there a statistical difference between designs? In Quantifying the user experience: Practical statistics for user research (pp. 63-102). Morgan Kaufmann. http://ccftp.scu.edu.cn/Download/e950b8e6-8398-468…