An Empirical Evaluation of Models of Programmer Navigation

Singh, Alka; Henley, Austin Z.; Fleming, Scott; Luong, Maria V.

doi:10.1109/icsme.2016.84

Cited by 4 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…Whenever developers want to implement a change task in a consistent manner on both platforms, they first have to identify the corresponding code sections that have to be changed in the original and ported code base. According to Singh et al and Fritz et al, considerable effort during maintenance tasks is spent on navigating code dependencies to understand the code and locate the parts relevant for completing such a change task. Especially when maintaining code written by other authors, developers spend about 35% of their time navigating.…”

Section: The Porting Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A porting method for coordinated multiplatform evolution

Stehle

Riebisch

2018

J Software Evolu Process

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Cross‐platform development nowadays is a key issue in software engineering, since software developers have to target multiple platforms in order to reach a larger number of users. Often, software is developed initially for one platform before being extended to multiplatform development. However, most of the existing technical support and methods for cross‐platform development are applicable only to projects that develop a software product from scratch. They do not address the frequent situation that an existing mature software shall be ported rather than being reimplemented for an additional platform. In this article, we present a flexible transformation method from single to multiplatform development that systematically leverages existing and novel tools. For facilitating coordinated evolution of the original and the target platform code, we establish traceability across the two versions and develop a common architecture across both the original and target platform implementations. As an economic advantage, the method allows to keep the original mature application and reduces maintenance redundancies compared with reimplementation. As a validation, the approach has been applied to port two mobile apps and a Java library to new platforms resulting in high portions of commonly used convertible code, structural equivalences across the original and target platform implementation and traceability between them.

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Section: The Porting Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A porting method for coordinated multiplatform evolution

Stehle

Riebisch

2018

J Software Evolu Process

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“…One key pattern is that most navigations tend to revisit code the programmer recently visited. For example, studies of predictive models of programmer navigation have consistently found that one of the strongest predictors of which code method (i.e., subroutine) a programmer would click in next was how recently he/she had visited the method (i.e., more recently implies more likely) [10,26,29,33,38,45]. Studies have also found that between 82% [16,45] and 95% [33] of programmer navigations were to previously visited methods.…”

Section: Programmer Navigationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Toward Principles for the Design of Navigation Affordances in Code Editors

Henley

Fleming

Luong

2017

Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

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Design principles are a key tool for creators of interactive systems; however, a cohesive set of principles has yet to emerge for the design of code editors. In this paper, we conducted a between-subjects empirical study comparing the navigation behaviors of 32 professional LabVIEW programmers using two different code-editor interfaces: the ubiquitous tabbed editor and the experimental Patchworks editor. Our analysis focused on how the programmers arranged and navigated among open information patches (i.e., code modules and program output). Key findings of our study included that Patchworks users made significantly fewer click actions per navigation, juxtaposed patches side by side significantly more, and exhibited significantly fewer navigation mistakes than tabbed-editor users. Based on these findings and more, we propose five general principles for the design of effective navigation affordances in code editors.

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