Characterizing and Understanding Development Sessions
Abstract
The understanding of development sessions, the phases during which a developer actively modifies a software system, is a valuable asset for program comprehension, since the sessions directly impact the current state and future evolution of a software system. Such information is usually lost by state-of-the-art versioning systems, because of the checkin/checkout model they rely on: a developer must explicitly commit his changes to the repository. Since this happens in arbitrary and sometimes long intervals, recovering the changes between two commits is difficult and inaccurate, and recovering the order of the changes is impossible. We have implemented an evolution monitoring prototype which records every semantic change performed on a system, and is able to completely reconstruct development sessions. In this paper we use this fine-grained information to understand and characterize the development sessions as they were carried out on two object-oriented systems.
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Activity Theory models consider interruptions after ~3 minutes of sustained attention at action level and after ~12 minutes at activity level.
“This study presented work fragmentation at two different levels: actions and activities.Interruptions originated after a period of around three minutes of sustained attention to the previous action were considered when people were switching at the level of interactions with artifacts of people.Interruptions originated after a period of twelve minutes of sustained attention to a previous activity w”
From Work fragmentation in developer interaction data (2017) · cites this paper as [33]
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- Authors
- Robbes, R., & Lanza, M.
- Affiliations
- Università della Svizzera italiana (CH)
- ORCID
- Venue
- 15th IEEE International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC '07)
- Publisher
- IEEE
- Published
- 2007-06
- Pages
- 155-166
- OpenAlex
- W2121459566
- Cited by
- 51
- References
- 24
- Citations by year
- 2026: 1 · 2025: 1 · 2023: 1 · 2022: 1 · 2021: 1 · 2019: 1 · 2017: 4 · 2016: 2 · 2015: 5 · 2014: 5 · 2013: 7 · 2012: 4
- FWCI
- 3.39
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- IEEE International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC) (publishedVersion)
- Open Research (University of Surrey) (submittedVersion)
- 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, version control, object-oriented software, software evolution
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