Programmers Are Users Too: Human-Centered Methods for Improving Programming Tools

Myers, Brad A.; Ko, Andrew J.; LaToza, Thomas D.; Yoon, Young Seok

doi:10.1109/mc.2016.200

Cited by 120 publications

(33 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…We took a user-centered approach [36] for designing a natural end-user development system [37]. We first studied how end users naturally communicate tasks with declarative concepts and control structures in natural language for various tasks in the mobile app context through a formative study on Amazon Mechanical Turk with 58 participants (41 of which are nonprogrammers; 38 men, 19 women, 1 non-binary person).…”

Section: Formative Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

PUMICE: A Multi-Modal Agent that Learns Concepts and Conditionals from Natural Language and Demonstrations

Radensky

Jia

et al. 2019

Proceedings of the 32nd Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology

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105

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Figure 1. Example structure of how PUMICE learns the concepts and procedures in the command "If it's hot, order a cup of Iced Cappuccino." The numbers indicate the order of utterances. The screenshot on the right shows the conversational interface of PUMICE. In this interactive parsing process, the agent learns how to query the current temperature, how to order any kind of drink from Starbucks, and the generalized concept of "hot" as "a temperature (of something) is greater than another temperature". ABSTRACTNatural language programming is a promising approach to enable end users to instruct new tasks for intelligent agents. However, our formative study found that end users would often use unclear, ambiguous or vague concepts when naturally instructing tasks in natural language, especially when specifying conditionals. Existing systems have limited support for letting the user teach agents new concepts or explaining unclear concepts. In this paper, we describe a new multimodal domain-independent approach that combines natural language programming and programming-by-demonstration to allow users to first naturally describe tasks and associated conditions at a high level, and then collaborate with the agent to recursively resolve any ambiguities or vagueness through conversations and demonstrations. Users can also define new procedures and concepts by demonstrating and referring to contents within GUIs of existing mobile apps. We demonstrate this approach in PUMICE, an end-user programmable agent that implements this approach. A lab study with 10 users showed its usability.

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Section: Formative Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

PUMICE: A Multi-Modal Agent that Learns Concepts and Conditionals from Natural Language and Demonstrations

Radensky

Jia

et al. 2019

Proceedings of the 32nd Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology

Self Cite

105

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“…While there is a lot of research on Human Computer Interaction in general, very little is specifically looking at software development and tools. However, there are examples of articles on usability of software tools, e.g., Myers et al [9], Dillon and Thomas [10]; as well as on design of software tools, e.g., Holzinger [11].…”

Section: B Exploratory Survey Of Cognitive Research Related To Softwmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cognitive Load Drivers in Large Scale Software Development

Helgesson

Engström

Runeson

et al. 2019

2019 IEEE/ACM 12th International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering (CHASE)

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Software engineers handle a lot of information in their daily work. We explore how software engineers interact with information management systems/tools, and to what extent these systems expose users to increased cognitive load. We reviewed the literature of cognitive aspects, relevant for software engineering, and performed an exploratory case study on how software engineers perceive information systems. Data was collected through five semistructured interviews. We present empirical evidence of the presence of cognitive load drivers, as a consequence of tool use in large scale software engineering.

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“…Usability is well-studied and its various aspects [34] also include the tools for implementing software [33]. Here, we focus on the implementation phase of projects using the (CL)S framework.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

User Support for the Combinator Logic Synthesizer Framework

Bessai

Vasileva

2018

Electron. Proc. Theor. Comput. Sci.

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Usability is crucial for the adoption of software development technologies. This is especially true in development stages, where build processes fail, because software is not yet complete or was incompletely modified. We present early work that aims to improve usability of the Combinatory Logic Synthesizer (CL)S framework, especially in these stages. (CL)S is a publicly available type-based development tool for the automatic composition of software components from a user-specified repository. It provides an implementation of a type inhabitation algorithm for Combinatory Logic with intersection types, which is fully integrated into the Scala programming language. Here, we specifically focus on building a web-based IDE to make potentially incomplete or erroneous input specifications for and decisions of the algorithm understandable for non-experts. A main aspect of this is providing graphical representations illustrating the step-wise search process of the algorithm. We also provide a detailed discussion of possible future work to further improve the understandability of these representations.

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Programmers Are Users Too: Human-Centered Methods for Improving Programming Tools

Cited by 120 publications

References 15 publications

PUMICE: A Multi-Modal Agent that Learns Concepts and Conditionals from Natural Language and Demonstrations

PUMICE: A Multi-Modal Agent that Learns Concepts and Conditionals from Natural Language and Demonstrations

Cognitive Load Drivers in Large Scale Software Development

User Support for the Combinator Logic Synthesizer Framework

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