Hard-to-answer questions about code

LaToza, Thomas D.; Myers, Brad A.

doi:10.1145/1937117.1937125

Cited by 104 publications

(54 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…LaToza and Myers [LM10] conducted a survey to investigate the questions that developers consider hard-to-answer. From the answers of 179 developers at Microsoft, the authors collected 371 questions like "Are the benefits of this refactoring worth the time investment?…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Do Tools Support Code Integration? A Survey.

Dias¹,

Ducasse²,

Cassou³

et al. 2016

JOT

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Integrating changes made by other developers is a difficult and tedious process. To understand how to help integrators, we first need to know the main questions they ask themselves while integrating and then relate these questions to the tool support that is needed. With this information, researchers and tool developers will be able to focus on the important questions that have little tool support.In this paper, we report on a 2-step study. In the first step, we did an open call to integrators. We ask them to list questions they ask themselves when they integrate a change. In the second step, based on the questions gathered during the first step and a literature survey, we built a list of 46 questions and run a survey to rank the importance of each question and if the level of tool support was adequate. We present the results we collected. Additionally, we present a taxonomy of the questions according to the kind of information that tools need to answer such questions.We found out that some questions like "Who is the author of this changed code?" are important and have good tool support whereas others like "Do all the changes within the commit belong together? (Can we split the commit?)" are moderately to extremely important and have no tool support.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Do Tools Support Code Integration? A Survey.

Dias¹,

Ducasse²,

Cassou³

et al. 2016

JOT

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The symbiosis of Soul with Smalltalk enables the Absinthe predicates to query the objects of the representation directly Table 1 depicts an excerpt from this predicate library. Three categories of predicates can be discerned: (1) predicates that reify history-specific information about a version (e.g., unary isVersion/1), (2) predicates that reify the structural entities within a version snapshot (e.g., unary isClass/1) and their relations (e.g., binary isClassInPackage:/2), and (3) predicates that reify frequently used sub-method information (e.g., methodReads:/2).…”

Section: Predicates For Quantifying Over the History Representationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We begin our discussion with examples that illustrate how Absinthe can be used by developers to answer some of the questions they commonly ask (e.g., as identified by the surveys [1,2]). …”

Section: History Queries Answering Developer Questionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A logic foundation for a general-purpose history querying tool

Stevens

Roover

Noguera

et al. 2014

Science of Computer Programming

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Version control systems (VCS) have become indispensable software development tools. The version snapshots they store to provide support for change coordination and release management, effectively track the evolution of the versioned software and its development process. Despite this wealth of historical information, it has only been leveraged by tools that are dedicated to a specific task such as empirical validation of software engineering practices or fault prediction. General-purpose tool support for reasoning about the historical information stored in a version control system is limited. This paper provides a comprehensive description of a logic-based, general-purpose history query tool called Absinthe. Absinthe supports querying versioned Smalltalk system using logic queries in which quantified regular path expressions are embedded. These expressions lend themselves to specifying the properties that each individual version in a sequence of successive software versions ought to exhibit. To demonstrate the general-purpose nature of our history query tool, we use it to verify development process constraints, to identify temporal bad smells and to answer questions that developers commonly ask. Finally, we compare a query written in Absinthe to an equivalent one written in Smalltalk.

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“…To help developers achieve a better understanding of their process, we examined seminal research [1][2][3] that found questions software developers ask. From this research, we focused on three question areas.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

TDDViz: Using Software Changes to Understand Conformance to Test Driven Development

Hilton

Nelson

McDonald

et al. 2016

Agile Processes, in Software Engineering, and Extreme Programming

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Abstract.A bad software development process leads to wasted effort and inferior products. In order to improve a software process, it must be first understood. Our unique approach in this paper uses code and test changes to understand conformance to the Test Driven Development (TDD) process.We designed and implemented TDDViz, a tool that supports developers in better understanding how they conform to TDD. TDDViz supports this understanding by providing novel visualizations of developers' TDD process. To enable TDDViz's visualizations, we developed a novel automatic inferencer that identifies the phases that make up the TDD process solely based on code and test changes.We evaluate TDDViz using two complementary methods: a controlled experiment with 35 participants to evaluate the visualization, and a case study with 2601 TDD Sessions to evaluate the inference algorithm. The controlled experiment shows that, in comparison to existing visualizations, participants performed significantly better when using TDDViz to answer questions about code evolution. In addition, the case study shows that the inferencing algorithm in TDDViz infers TDD phases with an accuracy (F-measure) of 87%.

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Hard-to-answer questions about code

Cited by 104 publications

References 21 publications

Do Tools Support Code Integration? A Survey.

Do Tools Support Code Integration? A Survey.

A logic foundation for a general-purpose history querying tool

TDDViz: Using Software Changes to Understand Conformance to Test Driven Development

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