Jiatong Liu

Jiatong Liu, Xue Yao, Zehua Zhang et al.

Debugging exercises are often assessed from final code and test outcomes, yet these artifacts hide how students reproduced failures, formed hypotheses, inspected evidence, edited code, and verified fixes. We present DebugTracker, a Visual Studio Code extension that records lightweight debugging-process evidence for classroom tasks. DebugTracker separates uncoached Evaluation Mode traces from coached Training Mode traces, stores append-only JSONL events, and exports timeline and Markdown reports for human review. The prototype records test commands, editor and debugger metadata, student checkpoints, source snapshots, optional image evidence, human labels, and optional AI-assisted practice feedback. DebugTracker is largely language-agnostic: it captures process evidence through standard VS Code mechanisms rather than language-specific tooling, although debugger evidence depends on the relevant VS Code language extension. We validate the prototype with debugging tasks in Python, TypeScript, and Java, 16 automated checks, and an 11-case manual trial matrix spanning packaged VSIX installation and three operating systems.

Xue Yao, Zehua Zhang, Jiatong Liu et al.

Empirical software engineering studies frequently build datasets from GitHub issues and pull requests. In many projects, researchers inspect pages in a browser, copy selected fields into spreadsheets, keep side notes in separate documents, and later run scripts to normalize or export the data. This workflow is flexible, but the page evidence, the research codes, and the rationale behind each decision end up spread across tabs and files, which leaves provenance, update tracking, and multi-reviewer labeling hard to audit. RepoTrace is a browser-assisted research tool that collects GitHub issue and pull-request evidence into a local SQLite-backed workspace. It combines a Chrome side-panel extension, an Express backend, and a React dashboard to capture page snapshots, comments, labels, notes, screening and labeling decisions, refresh history, and scoped exports, keeping the source evidence and the research interpretation linked together. A validation pass collected and checked 20 Matplotlib issues across two study projects. The resulting dataset preserves 22 snapshots, 38 comments, 20 research notes, 98 annotations, 20 screening reviews, 20 fix-evidence entries, and 4 simulated unresolved consensus conflicts. The results show that RepoTrace can support a complete local evidence-collection workflow for manually constructed GitHub issue and pull-request datasets.