In recent years, the software engineering community has begun to study program navigation and tools to support it. Some of these navigation tools are very useful, but they lack a theoretical basis that could reduce the need for ad hoc tool building approaches by explaining what is fundamentally necessary in such tools. In this paper, we present PFIS (Programmer Flow by Information Scent), a model and algorithm of programmer navigation during software maintenance. We also describe an experimental study of expert programmers debugging real bugs described in real bug reports for a real Java application. We found that PFIS' performance was close to aggregated human decisions as to where to navigate, and was significantly better than individual programmers' decisions.
Abstract-The Psychomotor Vigilance Task (PVT) is a validated reaction time (RT) test used to assess aspects of sleep loss including alertness and sleepiness. PVT typically requires a physical button to assess RT, which minimizes the effect of execution time (the time taken to perform a gesture) on RT. When translating this application to mobile devices, a touchscreen version is useful for widespread in situ sleepiness assessments to produce more ecologically valid data. We describe the Android-based implementation of a touchscreen version of PVT, called PVTTouch. In an evaluation (N=20), we compared four different touchscreen input techniques to a physical button: touch down, finger lift, finger tilt, and goal crossing. We found that touch down was comparable to the physical button approach used in traditional PVT in execution time and in several measures associated with sleepiness, and was preferred by most participants. We also found that finger lift may be a more precise but less intuitive measure, which may warrant further study.
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