Program navigation analysis to support task-aware software development environments
Abstract
Performing a software modification requires a developer to investigate a program to find and understand the code relevant to the modification task. Although standard program investigation tools can help developers in this activity, developers often get lost in the complex web of information available about a program. To address this problem we propose to use program navigation analysis, a technique to record and analyze the actions of a developer using a software development environment in order to infer the current task and the subset of a program relevant to this task. Our hypothesis is that we can use the results of program navigation analysis to dynamically configure the interface of a software development environment in a way that alleviates the problems of disorientation experienced by developers. In this paper, we define program navigation analysis and present an overview of its underpinnings, summarize our experience with the technique, highlight important technical challenges, and discuss the benefits that can be reaped from use of the technique.
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Only little research has been performed on task switch detection in the software development domain and all of this research has focused solely on software development tasks within the IDE.
“Only little research has been performed on task switch detection in the software development domain and all of this research has focused solely on software development tasks within the IDE.”
From Detecting Developers' Task Switches and Types (2022) · cites this paper as [28]
Robillard and Murphy proposed to use program navigation logs to infer development tasks and built a prototype without evaluating it.
“Robillard and Murphy [28] proposed to use program navigation logs to infer development tasks and they built a prototype, however, without evaluating it.”
From Detecting Developers' Task Switches and Types (2022) · cites this paper as [28]
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- Authors
- Robillard, M. P.
- Affiliations
- University of British Columbia (CA)
- Corresponding author
- Robillard, M.P.
- ORCID
- Robillard, M.P.
- Venue
- "Workshop on Directions in Software Engineering Environments (WoDiSEE2004)" W2S Workshop - 26th International Conference on Software Engineering
- Publisher
- IEE
- Published
- 2004
- Volume
- 2004
- Pages
- 83-88
- OpenAlex
- W2100510954
- Cited by
- 11
- References
- 23
- Citations by year
- 2022: 1 · 2020: 2 · 2013: 1 · 2012: 1
- FWCI
- 0.74
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Software Engineering Research
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Software Engineering Techniques and Practices
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Advanced Software Engineering Methodologies
- Keywords
- program comprehension, software modification
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