Helping programmers navigate code faster with Patchworks: A simulation study

Abstract

Programmers spend considerable time navigating source code, and we recently proposed the Patchworks code editor to help address this problem. A prior preliminary study of Patchworks found that it significantly reduced programmer navigation time and navigation errors. In this paper, we expand on these findings by investigating the effect of various patch-arranging strategies in Patchworks. To evaluate these strategies, we ran a simulation study based on actual programmer navigation data. Our simulator results showed (1) that none of the strategies tested had a significant effect on programmer-navigation time, and (2) that navigating code using Patchworks, regardless of strategy, was significantly faster than using Eclipse.

Toward Principles for the Design of Navigation Affordances in Code Editors

“…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.…”

“…As our main analysis, we used qualitative coding methods to identify where the participants navigated-that is, on which patches they placed their attention-throughout each of their sessions. Following the coding rules from a prior study [16], we coded each time (accurate to a second) a participant moved his/her attention from one patch to another. Additionally, we coded navigation mistakes based on participants' utterances after a navigation, indicating if a navigation did not result in their intended destination.…”

“…To compare the navigation behavior of textual language programmers and visual dataflow language programmers, we compared our data with results reported by four prior studies (i.e., [14,16,36,37]). We focused our comparison on two key navigations traits: (1) how much the programmers navigated and (2) how much the programmers revisited patches.…”

“…In a preliminary evaluation [15], Patchworks users navigated significantly faster and made fewer navigation mistakes than users of a tabbed editor (Eclipse). A subsequent simulation study [16] also showed that Patchworks can significantly increase the number…”

Developers’ Foraging Behavior on Stack Overflow

“…To understand the information seeking behavior of developers on Q&A platforms, we used variation foraging theory [6]- [8], an extension of Information Foraging Theory (IFT) [9]. IFT is a theory of information seeking that has been applied successfully to diverse domains such as documents, the web, user interfaces, and programming [8], [10]- [17]. IFT helps to explain a developer's foraging behavior by relating it to primitive hunting and foraging strategies for food.…”