The Influence of the Task on Programmer Behaviour
Abstract
Programmers performing a change task must understand the existing software in addition to performing the actual change. This process is likely to be affected by characteristics of the task. We investigated whether the nature of a task has any relationship with when a programmer edits code during a programming session. We characterized differences in editing behaviour with three types of editing styles: edit-first, edit-last, and edit-throughout. We based our analysis on the interaction history of over 4000 programming sessions collected as part of the development history of open source projects. Our results showed that an enhancement task (as opposed to a bug fix) was less likely to be associated with a high fraction of source code edit events at the beginning of the programming session. To our surprise, we also found that the presence of a stack trace in a bug report did not significantly effect the editing style of the programming session.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
The citation lists haven’t been fetched yet
References 39 · Cited by 41
- Authors
- Ying, A. T. T., & Robillard, M. P.
- Affiliations
- McGill University (CA)
- ORCID
- Robillard, Martin P.
- Venue
- 2011 IEEE 19th International Conference on Program Comprehension
- Publisher
- IEEE
- Published
- 2011-06
- Pages
- 31-40
- OpenAlex
- W2144961539
- Cited by
- 41
- References
- 39
- Citations by year
- 2025: 1 · 2024: 1 · 2022: 1 · 2020: 2 · 2019: 1 · 2018: 1 · 2017: 5 · 2016: 9 · 2015: 9 · 2014: 4 · 2013: 4 · 2012: 2
- FWCI
- 2.64
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- IEEE International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC) (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- McGill University
- Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada
- 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 › Computer Science Applications › Open Source Software Innovations
- Keywords
- bug fixes, software improvement, task characteristics, code editing, open source software, bug reports, stack traces
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
