The Impact of View Histories on Edit Recommendations

On the use of developers’ context for automatic refactoring of software anti-patterns

“…Users f ound their proposed tool to be more accurate than previous tools. Recently, Lee et al (2015) proposed an approach (named MI) to recommend relevant entities to developers. They used both view and selection activities on the entities from the developer's context and mine association rules to identify relevant entities.…”

Noises in Interaction Traces Data and Their Impact on Previous Research Studies

“…NavClus [8] improves the previous approaches by clustering navigational cycles. MI [9] includes view/selection histories of program entities in association rules and recommend entities that are not yet edited. Kersten and Murphy [5] used ITs to build task contexts and recommend program entities to developers.…”

“…At the event level, we focus on the noises for edit events because (1) edit events are more accurately identifiable from video data than other events as it is trivial to see in the videos if the code is being changed and (2) edit events are subject to several assumptions, such as being representative of the activity of changing source code [9], [16], [19]. Also, edit events have been used to build code recommendation tools [4], [9] and as proxy to productivity [5], [16].…”

“…Also, edit events have been used to build code recommendation tools [4], [9] and as proxy to productivity [5], [16]. Thus, any bias related to edit events would impact such previous studies.…”

“…Developers' interaction traces (ITs), also known as activity logs, have been used to study developers' preferred views in an IDE [10], edit styles [22], [24], and exploration strategies [19] as well as work fragmentation [16], maintenance effort [14], [18], change prediction [1], and impact analysis [23]. Developers' ITs have also been used to provide tool support through code completion [13] and recommendations of relevant program entities [4], [8], [9]. They are usually collected by monitoring tools, such as Mimec [7] or Mylyn [11].…”