Answering conceptual queries with Ferret

Alwis, Brian de; Murphy, Gail C.

doi:10.1145/1368088.1368092

Cited by 46 publications

(42 citation statements)

References 34 publications

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“…We plan to enhance its filters and the visual presentation of changes to run a user study in which we can measure whether and how much Replay can help developer to answer program comprehension questions. To accomplish that, we plan to ask subjects to answer some of the questions cataloged in previous work [33,5,23,20,35], and compare their performances using Replay against using commonly adopted differencing algorithms for SCM revisions.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Previous studies have provided catalogs of such questions, from which two focus on questions related to source code [33,5], and three explore questions related to development activities [23,20,35]. For our case study, we concentrate on answering a subset of the questions (shown in Table 2) raised by Fritz and Murphy [35], which cover a broad set of development activities.…”

Section: Case Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Replaying past changes in multi-developer projects

Hattori

Lungu

Lanza

2010

Proceedings of the Joint ERCIM Workshop on Software Evolution (EVOL) and International Workshop on Principles of Software Evolu

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What was I working on before the weekend? and What were the members of the my team working on during the last week? are common questions that are frequently asked by a developer. They can be answered if one keeps track of who changes what in the source code. In this work, we present Replay, a tool that allows one to replay past changes as they happened at a fine-grained level, where a developer can watch what she has done or understand what her colleagues have done in past development sessions. With this tool, developers are able to not only understand what sequence of changes brought the system to a certain state (e.g., the introduction of a defect), but also deduce reasons for why her colleagues performed those changes. One of the applications of such a tool is also discovering the changes that broke the code of a developer.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Case Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

Replaying past changes in multi-developer projects

Hattori

Lungu

Lanza

2010

Proceedings of the Joint ERCIM Workshop on Software Evolution (EVOL) and International Workshop on Principles of Software Evolu

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“…From an abstract IFT perspective, these cues aim to engender highly accurate scent Sji in the minds of predators. Similar concepts, like Ferret [De Alwis and Murphy 2008] and Information Fragments [Fritz and Murphy 2010] make it easier for the programmer to ask and answer particular questions by using a context-sensitive view that identifies relationships between different artifacts as well as people in a project. In particular, information fragments can display links to artifacts in response to a "What code files is someone working on?"…”

Section: Debuggingmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Information Foraging Theory Perspective on Tools for Debugging, Refactoring, and Reuse Tasks

Fleming

Scaffidi

Piorkowski

et al. 2013

ACM Trans. Softw. Eng. Methodol.

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Theories of human behavior are an important but largely untapped resource for software engineering research. They facilitate understanding of human developers' needs and activities, and thus can serve as a valuable resource to researchers designing software engineering tools. Furthermore, theories abstract beyond specific methods and tools to fundamental principles that can be applied to new situations. Toward filling this gap, we investigate the applicability and utility of Information Foraging Theory (IFT) for understanding information-intensive software engineering tasks, drawing upon literature in three areas: debugging, refactoring, and reuse. In particular, we focus on software engineering tools that aim to support information-intensive activities, that is, activities in which developers spend time seeking information. Regarding applicability, we consider whether and how the mathematical equations within IFT can be used to explain why certain existing tools have proven empirically successful at helping software engineers. Regarding utility, we applied an IFT perspective to identify recurring design patterns in these successful tools, and consider what opportunities for future research are revealed by our IFT perspective.

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“…Additionally, queries used in this phase were based on templates created after conducting experiments with professional programmers for the identification of standard and useful software engineering questions that programmers tend to ask when evolving a code base (de Alwis and Murphy, 2008;Sillito et al, 2006Sillito et al, , 2008. The 50 queries were generated to include ones with varying levels of complexity: simple ones such as 'Which methods have the declared return class x?'…”

Section: Semantic Evaluation At Large Scale (Seals) -Searchmentioning

confidence: 99%