Questions programmers ask during software evolution tasks
Abstract
Though many tools are available to help programmers working on change tasks, and several studies have been conducted to understand how programmers comprehend systems, little is known about the specific kinds of questions programmers ask when evolving a code base. To fill this gap we conducted two qualitative studies of programmers performing change tasks to medium to large sized programs. One study involved newcomers working on assigned change tasks to a medium-sized code base. The other study involved industrial programmers working on their own change tasks on code with which they had experience. The focus of our analysis has been on what information a programmer needs to know about a code base while performing a change task and also on howthey go about discovering that information. Based on this analysis we catalog and categorize 44 different kinds of questions asked by our participants. We also describe important context for how those questions were answered by our participants, including their use of tools.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
Little is known at the foundational level about how well developers can predict the value and cost of their navigations, and SE research has not systematically considered this.
“Despite these gains, however, little is known at the foundational level of developer navigation-how well developers go about choosing where to navigate.”
From Foraging and navigations, fundamentally: developers' predictions of value and cost (2016) · cites this paper as [42]
Developers seek information to answer specific questions, test mental hypotheses, develop context, or follow leads.
“These studies have also revealed that developers seek this information to answer specific questions that they have [23,42], to test mental hypotheses about how an existing program works [4], to develop an overall sense of context [13], or to follow leads that simply look relevant to their current task [26].”
From Foraging and navigations, fundamentally: developers' predictions of value and cost (2016) · cites this paper as [42]
Cites
Wagner, H. R., Glaser, B. G., & Strauss, A. L. (1968) · Social Forces · doi:10.2307/2575405 · Cited by 46,470 · see citing works
(1998) · Sage eBooks · Cited by 38,631 · see citing works
The Think Aloud Method: A Practical Guide to Modelling Cognitive Processes
van Someren, M. (1994) · Cited by 975 · see citing works
Empirical Studies of Programming Knowledge
Soloway, E. M., & Ehrlich, K. (1984) · IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering · doi:10.1109/tse.1984.5010283 · Cited by 875 · see citing works
Strengthening the case for pair programming
Williams, L. A., Kessler, R. R., Cunningham, W., & Jeffries, R. (2000) · IEEE Software · doi:10.1109/52.854064 · Cited by 779 · see citing works
Program comprehension during software maintenance and evolution
von Mayrhauser, A., & Vans, A. M. (1995) · Computer · doi:10.1109/2.402076 · Cited by 578 · see citing works
Stimulus structures and mental representations in expert comprehension of computer programs
Pennington, N. (1987) · Cognitive Psychology · doi:10.1016/0010-0285(87)90007-7 · Cited by 526 · see citing works
Constructive Interaction and the Iterative Process of Understanding
Miyake, N. (1986) · Cognitive Science · doi:10.1207/s15516709cog1002_2 · Cited by 445 · see citing works
The Interlisp Programming Environment
Teitelman, W., & Masinter, L. M. (1981) · Computer · doi:10.1109/c-m.1981.220410 · Cited by 356 · see citing works
Cognitive processes in program comprehension
Letovsky, S. I. (1987) · Journal of Systems and Software · doi:10.1016/0164-1212(87)90032-x · Cited by 353 · see citing works
How effective developers investigate source code: an exploratory study
Robillard, M. P., Coelho, W., & Murphy, G. C. (2004) · IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering · doi:10.1109/tse.2004.101 · Cited by 263 · see citing works
Self-citationCognitive design elements to support the construction of a mental model during software exploration
Storey, M.-A., Fracchia, F. D., & Müller, H. A. (1999) · Journal of Systems and Software · doi:10.1016/s0164-1212(98)10055-9 · Cited by 240 · see citing works
Eliciting design requirements for maintenance-oriented IDEs
Ko, A. J., Aung, H. H., & Myers, B. A. (2005) · ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion Proceedings (ICSE-Companion) · doi:10.1145/1062455.1062492 · Cited by 182 · see citing works
How do program understanding tools affect how programmers understand programs?
Storey, M.-A., Wong, K. K., & Müller, H. A. (2000) · Science of Computer Programming · doi:10.1016/s0167-6423(99)00036-2 · Cited by 156 · see citing works
Towards understanding programs through wear-based filtering
DeLine, R., Khella, A., Czerwinski, M., & Robertson, G. (2005) · Proceedings of the 2005 ACM symposium on Software visualization · doi:10.1145/1056018.1056044 · Cited by 91 · see citing works
From code understanding needs to reverse engineering tool capabilities
von Mayrhauser, A., & Vans, A. M. (2002) · International Workshop on Computer-Aided Software Engineering (CASE) · doi:10.1109/case.1993.634824 · Cited by 76 · see citing works
Preserving knowledge in design projects
Herbsleb, J. D., & Kuwana, E. (1993) · ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) · doi:10.1145/169059.169061 · Cited by 55 · see citing works
Early field experience with the Software Reconnaissance technique for program comprehension
Wilde, N., & Casey, C. J. (2002) · doi:10.1109/wcre.1996.558934 · Cited by 49 · see citing works
Partial comprehension of complex programs (enough to perform maintenance)
Erdos, K., & Sneed, H. M. (2002) · doi:10.1109/wpc.1998.693322 · Cited by 46 · see citing works
Managing software change tasks: an exploratory study
Sillito, J., Volder, K. D., Fisher, B., & Murphy, G. C. (2005) · International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering · doi:10.1109/isese.2005.1541811 · Cited by 39 · see citing works
Self-citationInteractive Explanation of Software Systems
Johnson, W. L., & Erdem, A. (1997) · Automated Software Engineering · doi:10.1023/a:1008655629091 · Cited by 33 · see citing works
Task oriented software understanding
Erdem, A., Johnson, W. L., & Marsella, S. (2002) · IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE) · doi:10.1109/ase.1998.732658 · Cited by 30 · see citing works
Flagged first, then by citations
Research works printed but not linked: 10
- 10.5555/521138.786884 · DOI
- 10.5555/580914.858205 · DOI
- Flor N. V., 1991, Proceedings of the Empirical Studies of Programmers: Fourth Workshop, 36
- Glaser B. G., 1967, Aldine Publishing
- 10.5555/164632.260021 · DOI
- 10.5555/788007.788157 · DOI
- Letovsky S., 1986, Proceedings of Conference on Empirical Studies of Programmers, 80
- Strauss A. L., 1998, Sage Publications
- van Someren M. W., 1994, Academic Press
- Wilde N., 1996, Proceedings of WCRE, 270
Cited by
Sorted by citations
Information Needs in Collocated Software Development Teams
Ko, A. J., DeLine, R., & Venolia, G. (2007) · 29th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE'07) · doi:10.1109/icse.2007.45 · Cited by 499 · see citing works
Automatic patch generation learned from human-written patches
Kim, D., Nam, J., Song, J., & Kim, S. (2013) · ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion Proceedings (ICSE-Companion) · doi:10.1109/icse.2013.6606626 · Cited by 471 · see citing works
Automatic patch generation learned from human-written patches
Kim, D., Nam, J., Song, J., & Kim, S. (2013) · Cited by 438 · see citing works
How do programmers ask and answer questions on the web? (NIER track)
Treude, C., Barzilay, O., & Storey, M. (2011) · ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion Proceedings (ICSE-Companion) · doi:10.1145/1985793.1985907 · Cited by 398 · see citing works
Asking and Answering Questions during a Programming Change Task
Sillito, J., Murphy, G. C., & Volder, K. D. (2008) · IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering · doi:10.1109/tse.2008.26 · Cited by 320 · see citing works
Self-citationMcMillan, C., Grechanik, M., Poshyvanyk, D., Xie, Q., & Fu, C. (2011) · ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion Proceedings (ICSE-Companion) · doi:10.1145/1985793.1985809 · Cited by 313 · see citing works
Software developers' perceptions of productivity
Meyer, A. N., Fritz, T., Murphy, G. C., & Zimmermann, T. (2014) · Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering · doi:10.1145/2635868.2635892 · Cited by 224 · see citing works
Self-citationInformation needs in bug reports
Breu, S., Premraj, R., Sillito, J., & Zimmermann, T. (2010) · ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) · doi:10.1145/1718918.1718973 · Cited by 204 · see citing works
Self-citation(2015) · doi:10.1007/s10664-013-9279-3 · Cited by 273 · see citing works
Wettel, R., Lanza, M., & Robbes, R. (2011) · ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion Proceedings (ICSE-Companion) · doi:10.1145/1985793.1985868 · Cited by 202 · see citing works
Information needs for software development analytics
Buse, R. P. L., & Zimmermann, T. (2012) · ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion Proceedings (ICSE-Companion) · doi:10.1109/icse.2012.6227122 · Cited by 189 · see citing works
How do professional developers comprehend software?
Roehm, T., Tiarks, R., Koschke, R., & Maalej, W. (2012) · ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion Proceedings (ICSE-Companion) · doi:10.1109/icse.2012.6227188 · Cited by 187 · see citing works
How do professional developers comprehend software
Roehm, T., Tiarks, R., Koschke, R., & Maalej, W. (2012) · doi:10.5555/2337223.2337254 · Cited by 165 · see citing works
What do developers search for on the web?
Xia, X., Bao, L., Lo, D., Kochhar, P. S., Hassan, A. E., & Xing, Z. (2017) · Empirical Software Engineering · doi:10.1007/s10664-017-9514-4 · Cited by 174 · see citing works
Categorizing the Content of GitHub README Files
Prana, G. A. A., Treude, C., Thung, F., Atapattu, T., & Lo, D. (2018) · Empirical Software Engineering · doi:10.1007/s10664-018-9660-3 · Cited by 143 · see citing works
Decoding the Representation of Code in the Brain: An fMRI Study of Code Review and Expertise
Floyd, B., Santander, T., & Weimer, W. R. (2017) · ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion Proceedings (ICSE-Companion) · doi:10.1109/icse.2017.24 · Cited by 136 · see citing works
(2018) · doi:10.1145/3274404 · Cited by 122 · see citing works
Finding causes of program output with the Java Whyline
Ko, A. J., & Myers, B. A. (2009) · CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems · doi:10.1145/1518701.1518942 · Cited by 123 · see citing works
Using information fragments to answer the questions developers ask
Fritz, T., & Murphy, G. C. (2010) · Proceedings of the 32nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering - Volume 1 · doi:10.1145/1806799.1806828 · Cited by 163 · see citing works
Self-citationA human study of patch maintainability
Fry, Z. P., Landau, B., & Weimer, W. R. (2012) · International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis · doi:10.1145/2338965.2336775 · Cited by 113 · see citing works
On-demand Developer Documentation
Robillard, M. P., Marcus, A., Treude, C., Bavota, G., Chaparro, O., Ernst, N., Gerosa, M. A., Godfrey, M. W., Lanza, M., Linares‐Vásquez, M., et al. (2017) · IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM) · doi:10.1109/icsme.2017.17 · Cited by 110 · see citing works
Self-citationTopology analysis of software dependencies
Robillard, M. P. (2008) · ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology · doi:10.1145/13487689.13487691 · Cited by 106 · see citing works
Analyzing and mining a code search engine usage log
Bajracharya, S. K., & Lopes, C. V. (2012) · Empirical Software Engineering · doi:10.1007/s10664-010-9144-6 · Cited by 90 · see citing works
DeLine, R. A., & Rowan, K. (2010) · doi:10.1145/1810295.1810331 · Cited by 89 · see citing works
For the Special issue on Qualitative Software Engineering Research
Dittrich, Y., John, M., Singer, J., & Tessem, B. (2007) · Information and Software Technology · doi:10.1016/j.infsof.2007.02.009 · Cited by 83 · see citing works
A Human Study of Comprehension and Code Summarization
Stapleton, S., Gambhir, Y., LeClair, A., Eberhart, Z., Weimer, W. R., Leach, K., & Huang, Y. (2020) · International Conference on Program Comprehension · doi:10.1145/3387904.3389258 · Cited by 81 · see citing works
Searching and skimming: An exploratory study
Starke, J., Luce, C., & Sillito, J. (2009) · IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM) · doi:10.1109/icsm.2009.5306335 · Cited by 76 · see citing works
Self-citationAddressing misconceptions about code with always-on programming visualizations
Lieber, T., Brandt, J., & Miller, R. C. (2014) · CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems · doi:10.1145/2556288.2557409 · Cited by 72 · see citing works
Recovering and using use-case-diagram-to-source-code traceability links
Grechanik, M., McKinley, K. S., & Perry, D. E. (2007) · doi:10.1145/1287624.1287640 · Cited by 71 · see citing works
Partitioning Composite Code Changes to Facilitate Code Review
Tao, Y., & Kim, S. (2015) · International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR) · doi:10.1109/msr.2015.24 · Cited by 66 · see citing works
Qi, D., Roychoudhury, A., Liang, Z., & Vaswani, K. (2009) · ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE) · doi:10.1145/1595696.1595704 · Cited by 65 · see citing works
Answering conceptual queries with Ferret
de Alwis, B., & Murphy, G. C. (2008) · Proceedings of the 30th international conference on Software engineering · doi:10.1145/1368088.1368092 · Cited by 63 · see citing works
Self-citationBeyond pretty pictures: Examining the benefits of code visualization for Open Source newcomers
Park, Y., & Jensen, C. (2009) · Visualizing Software for Understanding and Analysis · doi:10.1109/vissof.2009.5336433 · Cited by 61 · see citing works
The whats and hows of programmers' foraging diets
Piorkowski, D. J., Fleming, S. D., Kwan, I., Burnett, M. M., Scaffidi, C., Bellamy, R. K. E., & Jordahl, J. (2013) · Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems · doi:10.1145/2470654.2466418 · Cited by 61 · see citing works
Analytics for software development
Buse, R. P. L., & Zimmermann, T. (2010) · FSE/SDP Workshop on Future of Software Engineering Research (FoSER) · doi:10.1145/1882362.1882379 · Cited by 60 · see citing works
Understanding Stack Overflow Code Fragments
Treude, C., & Robillard, M. P. (2017) · IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM) · doi:10.1109/icsme.2017.24 · Cited by 58 · see citing works
Software history under the lens: A study on why and how developers examine it
Codoban, M., Ragavan, S. S., Dig, D., & Bailey, B. P. (2015) · IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM) · doi:10.1109/icsm.2015.7332446 · Cited by 57 · see citing works
CodeOntology: RDF-ization of Source Code
Atzeni, M., & Atzori, M. (2017) · Lecture notes in computer science · doi:10.1007/978-3-319-68204-4_2 · Cited by 57 · see citing works
Software Practitioner Perspectives on Merge Conflicts and Resolutions
McKee, S., NELSON, N. M., Sarma, A., & Dig, D. (2017) · IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM) · doi:10.1109/icsme.2017.53 · Cited by 55 · see citing works
Unakite: Scaffolding Developers' Decision-Making Using the Web
Liu, M. X., Hsieh, J., Hahn, N., Zhou, A., Deng, E., Burley, S., Taylor, C., Kittur, A., & Myers, B. A. (2019) · ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST) · doi:10.1145/3332165.3347908 · Cited by 56 · see citing works
Holmes, R., & Begel, A. (2008) · International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR) · doi:10.1145/1370750.1370755 · Cited by 54 · see citing works
Supporting developers with natural language queries
Würsch, M., Ghezzi, G., Reif, G., & Gall, H. C. (2010) · ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion Proceedings (ICSE-Companion) · doi:10.1145/1806799.1806827 · Cited by 53 · see citing works
Piorkowski, D., Fleming, S., Scaffidi, C., Bogart, C., Burnett, M., John, B., Bellamy, R., & Swart, C. (2012) · Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems · doi:10.1145/2207676.2208608 · Cited by 50 · see citing works
SourceVis: Collaborative software visualization for co-located environments
Anslow, C., Marshall, S., Noble, J., & Biddle, R. (2013) · IEEE Working Conference on Software Visualization (VISSOFT) · doi:10.1109/vissoft.2013.6650527 · Cited by 47 · see citing works
Developers' code context models for change tasks
Fritz, T., Shepherd, D. C., Kevic, K., Snipes, W., & Bräunlich, C. (2014) · Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering · doi:10.1145/2635868.2635905 · Cited by 45 · see citing works
Debugging Revisited: Toward Understanding the Debugging Needs of Contemporary Software Developers
Layman, L. M., Diep, M. M., Nagappan, M., Singer, J., DeLine, R. A., & Venolia, G. D. (2013) · Proceedings of the ... ACM-IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement/International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement · doi:10.1109/esem.2013.43 · Cited by 44 · see citing works
Analysing source code: looking for useful verb–direct object pairs in all the right places
Fry, Z. P., Shepherd, D. C., Hill, E., et al. (2008) · IET Software · doi:10.1049/iet-sen:20070112 · Cited by 43 · see citing works
Qi, D., Roychoudhury, A., Liang, Z., & Vaswani, K. (2012) · ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology · doi:10.1145/2211616.2211622 · Cited by 42 · see citing works
Chen, F., & Kim, S. (2015) · ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE) · doi:10.1145/2786805.2786819 · Cited by 41 · see citing works
Ivie: Lightweight Anchored Explanations of Just-Generated Code
Yan, L., Hwang, A., Wu, Z., & Head, A. (2024) · CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems · doi:10.1145/3613904.3642239 · Cited by 40 · see citing works
Modeling programmer navigation: A head-to-head empirical evaluation of predictive models
Piorkowski, D., Fleming, S. D., Scaffidi, C., John, L. K., Bogart, C., John, B. E., Burnett, M., & Bellamy, R. (2011) · IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC) · doi:10.1109/vlhcc.2011.6070387 · Cited by 39 · see citing works
To fix or to learn? How production bias affects developers' information foraging during debugging
Piorkowski, D., Fleming, S. D., Scaffidi, C. P., Burnett, M., Kwan, I., Henley, A. Z., Macbeth, J., Hill, C., & Horvath, A. (2015) · IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM) · doi:10.1109/icsm.2015.7332447 · Cited by 37 · see citing works
Ceccato, M., Tonella, P., Basile, C., Falcarin, P., Torchiano, M., Coppens, B., & Sutter, B. D. (2018) · Empirical Software Engineering · doi:10.1007/s10664-018-9625-6 · Cited by 39 · see citing works
The life-cycle of merge conflicts: processes, barriers, and strategies
Nelson, N., Brindescu, C., McKee, S., Sarma, A., & Dig, D. (2019) · Empirical Software Engineering · doi:10.1007/s10664-018-9674-x · Cited by 38 · see citing works
Foraging and navigations, fundamentally: developers' predictions of value and cost
Piorkowski, D., Henley, A. Z., Nabi, T., Fleming, S. D., Scaffidi, C., & Burnett, M. (2016) · Proceedings of the 2016 24th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering · doi:10.1145/2950290.2950302 · Cited by 38 · see citing works
Ressia, J., Bergel, A., & Nierstrasz, O. (2012) · doi:10.7892/boris.17302 · Cited by 36 · see citing works
A Replication Study on Code Comprehension and Expertise using Lightweight Biometric Sensors
Fucci, D., Girardi, D., Novielli, N., Quaranta, L., & Lanubile, F. (2019) · IEEE International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC) · doi:10.1109/icpc.2019.00050 · Cited by 35 · see citing works
Kim, Y., Kim, J.-Y., Jeon, H., Kim, Y.-H., Song, H., Kim, B., & Seo, J. (2020) · IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics · doi:10.1109/tvcg.2020.3030414 · Cited by 36 · see citing works
Facilitating Crowd Sourced Software Engineering via Stack Overflow
Barzilay, O., Treude, C., & Zagalsky, A. (2013) · Springer eBooks · doi:10.1007/978-1-4614-6596-6_15 · Cited by 36 · see citing works
Software Evolution Comprehension: Replay to the Rescue
Hattori, L., D’Ambros, M., Lanza, M., & Lungu, M. F. (2011) · IEEE International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC) · doi:10.1109/icpc.2011.39 · Cited by 35 · see citing works
Empirical Software Engineering
Guéhéneuc, Y., & Khomh, F. (2019) · Springer eBooks · doi:10.1007/978-3-030-00262-6_7 · Cited by 34 · see citing works
Communicative Intention in Code Review Questions
Ebert, F., Castor, F., Novielli, N., & Serebrenik, A. (2018) · IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM) · doi:10.1109/icsme.2018.00061 · Cited by 33 · see citing works
Ressia, J., Bergel, A., & Nierstrasz, O. (2012) · Proceedings/Proceedings - International Conference on Software Engineering · doi:10.1109/icse.2012.6227167 · Cited by 33 · see citing works
A field study of how developers locate features in source code
Damevski, K., Shepherd, D. C., & Pollock, L. (2015) · Empirical Software Engineering · doi:10.1007/s10664-015-9373-9 · Cited by 32 · see citing works
Liu, M. X., Kittur, A., & Myers, B. A. (2022) · CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems · doi:10.1145/3491102.3501968 · Cited by 33 · see citing works
SEON: a pyramid of ontologies for software evolution and its applications
Würsch, M., Ghezzi, G., Hert, M., et al. (2012) · Computing · doi:10.1007/s00607-012-0204-1 · Cited by 32 · see citing works
Toward an Objective Measure of Developers’ Cognitive Activities
Sharafi, Z., Huang, Y., Leach, K., & Weimer, W. R. (2021) · ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology · doi:10.1145/3434643 · Cited by 30 · see citing works
Supporting Developers' Coordination in the IDE
Guzzi, A., Bacchelli, A., Riche, Y., & Arie Van Deursen, A. (2015) · ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) · doi:10.1145/2675133.2675177 · Cited by 26 · see citing works
Understanding Ajax Applications by Connecting Client and Server-Side Execution Traces
Zaidman, A., Matthijssen, N., Storey, M. A. (., & Arie Van Deursen, A. (2012) · Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS) · Cited by 27 · see citing works
CodeCity: A comparison of on-screen and virtual reality
Moreno-Lumbreras, D., Minelli, R., Villaverde, A., et al. (2022) · Information and Software Technology · doi:10.1016/j.infsof.2022.107064 · Cited by 26 · see citing works
Querying Source Code with Natural Language
Kimmig, M., Monperrus, M., Mezini, M., et al. (2011) · Cited by 26 · see citing works
Thematic Review and Analysis of Grounded Theory Application in Software Engineering
Badreddin, O. B. (2013) · Advances in Software Engineering · doi:10.1155/2013/468021 · Cited by 25 · see citing works
Identifying program, test, and environmental changes that affect behaviour
Holmes, R., & Notkin, D. S. (2011) · ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion Proceedings (ICSE-Companion) · doi:10.1145/1985793.1985844 · Cited by 24 · see citing works
Categorizing developer information needs in software ecosystems
Haenni, N., Lungu, M. F., Schwarz, N., & Nierstrasz, O. (2013) · doi:10.1145/2501585.2501586 · Cited by 24 · see citing works
Towards Actionable Visualisation in Software Development
Merino, L., Ghafari, M., & Nierstrasz, O. (2016) · IEEE Working Conference on Software Visualization (VISSOFT) · doi:10.1109/vissoft.2016.10 · Cited by 24 · see citing works
To Reuse or Not To Reuse?: A Framework and System for Evaluating Summarized Knowledge
Liu, M. X., Kittur, A., & Myers, B. A. (2021) · Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction · doi:10.1145/3449240 · Cited by 23 · see citing works
Chattopadhyay, S., NELSON, N. M., Au, A., Morales, N., Sanchez, C. A., Pandita, R., & Sarma, A. (2020) · ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion Proceedings (ICSE-Companion) · doi:10.1145/3377811.3380330 · Cited by 23 · see citing works
CodeCity: On-Screen or in Virtual Reality?
Moreno-Lumbreras, D., Minelli, R., Villaverde, A., et al. (2021) · IEEE Working Conference on Software Visualization (VISSOFT) · doi:10.1109/vissoft52517.2021.00011 · Cited by 22 · see citing works
Supporting software history exploration
Bradley, A. W. J., & Murphy, G. C. (2011) · International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR) · doi:10.1145/1985441.1985469 · Cited by 22 · see citing works
Self-citationSharif, K. Y., English, M., Alí, N., Exton, C., Collins, J. J., & Buckley, J. (2014) · Information and Software Technology · doi:10.1016/j.infsof.2014.09.003 · Cited by 22 · see citing works
Head, A., Sadowski, C., Murphy-Hill, E. R., & Knight, A. (2018) · ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion Proceedings (ICSE-Companion) · doi:10.1145/3180155.3180176 · Cited by 22 · see citing works
Characterizing the transfer of program comprehension in onboarding: an information-push perspective
Yates, R., Power, N., & Buckley, J. (2019) · Empirical Software Engineering · doi:10.1007/s10664-019-09741-6 · Cited by 22 · see citing works
Answering software evolution questions: An empirical evaluation
Hattori, L., D’Ambros, M., Lanza, M., & Lungu, M. F. (2012) · Information and Software Technology · doi:10.1016/j.infsof.2012.09.001 · Cited by 21 · see citing works
To Search or To Gen? Exploring the Synergy between Generative AI and Web Search in Programming
Yen, R., Sultanum, N., & Zhao, J. (2024) · CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA) · doi:10.1145/3613905.3650867 · Cited by 21 · see citing works
Recommending change clusters to support software investigation: an empirical study
Robillard, M. P., & Dagenais, B. (2009) · Journal of Software Maintenance and Evolution Research and Practice · doi:10.1002/smr.413 · Cited by 21 · see citing works
Reducing user input requests to improve IT support ticket resolution process
Gupta, M., Asadullah, A. M., Padmanabhuni, S., & Serebrenik, A. (2017) · Empirical Software Engineering · doi:10.1007/s10664-017-9532-2 · Cited by 21 · see citing works
A Clustering-Based Approach to Enriching Code Foraging Environment
Niu, N., Jin, X., Niu, Z., Cheng, J.-R. C., Li, L., & Kataev, M. Y. (2015) · IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics · doi:10.1109/tcyb.2015.2419811 · Cited by 21 · see citing works
Wettel, R. (2010) · reroDoc Digital Library · Cited by 20 · see citing works
Latent Patterns in Activities: A Field Study of How Developers Manage Context
Chattopadhyay, S., NELSON, N. M., Gonzalez, Y. R., Leon, A. A., Pandita, R., & Sarma, A. (2019) · ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion Proceedings (ICSE-Companion) · doi:10.1109/icse.2019.00051 · Cited by 18 · see citing works
The Effect of Richer Visualizations on Code Comprehension
Asenov, D., Hilliges, O., & Müller, P. (2016) · CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems · doi:10.1145/2858036.2858372 · Cited by 20 · see citing works
Querying source code with natural language
Kimmig, M., Monperrus, M., & Mezini, M. (2011) · IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE) · doi:10.1109/ase.2011.6100076 · Cited by 19 · see citing works
Impact of tool support in patch construction
Koyuncu, A., Bissyandé, T. F., Kim, D., Klein, J., Monperrus, M., & Traon, Y. L. (2017) · ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA) · doi:10.1145/3092703.3092713 · Cited by 18 · see citing works
A three-year participant observation of software startup software evolution
Ko, A. J. (2017) · IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Practice (ICSE-SEIP) · doi:10.1109/icse-seip.2017.29 · Cited by 18 · see citing works
What Do Developers Want? An Advisor Approach for Developer Priorities
Sharma, V. S., Mehra, R., & Kaulgud, V. (2017) · IEEE/ACM International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering (CHASE) · doi:10.1109/chase.2017.14 · Cited by 17 · see citing works
Mendel: Source code recommendation based on a genetic metaphor
Lozano, A., Kellens, A., & Mens, K. (2011) · IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE) · doi:10.1109/ase.2011.6100078 · Cited by 17 · see citing works
Greene, G. J., Esterhuizen, M., & Fischer, B. (2017) · Information and Software Technology · doi:10.1016/j.infsof.2016.12.001 · Cited by 25 · see citing works
The Past, Present and Future of Programming in HCI
Myers, B. A., & Ko, A. J. (2018) · doi:10.1184/r1/6626156 · Cited by 17 · see citing works
An Overview of Semantic Search Evaluation Initiatives
Elbedweihy, K., Wrigley, S. N., Clough, P. D., & Ciravegna, F. (2014) · Journal of Web Semantics · doi:10.1016/j.websem.2014.10.001 · Cited by 16 · see citing works
Enabling program comprehension through a visual object-focused development environment
Olivero, F., Lanza, M., D’Ambros, M., & Robbes, R. (2011) · IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC) · doi:10.1109/vlhcc.2011.6070389 · Cited by 16 · see citing works
The Usability (or Not) of Refactoring Tools
Eilertsen, A. M., & Murphy, G. C. (2021) · IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER) · doi:10.1109/saner50967.2021.00030 · Cited by 16 · see citing works
Self-citation
- Authors
- Sillito, J., Murphy, G. C., & De Volder, K.
- Affiliations
- University of British Columbia (CA)
- University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C. Canada
- Venue
- Proceedings of the 14th ACM SIGSOFT international symposium on Foundations of software engineering
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2006-11-05
- Pages
- 23-34
- OpenAlex
- W2080534028
- Semantic Scholar
- 3dda5d9a5e4eb27760e8a4a381a1057ce0ba7d65
- Cited by
- 270
- References
- 22
- Citations by year
- 2026: 6 · 2025: 14 · 2024: 9 · 2023: 1 · 2022: 10 · 2021: 11 · 2020: 9 · 2019: 10 · 2018: 12 · 2017: 18 · 2016: 16 · 2015: 20 · 2014: 20 · 2013: 25 · 2012: 23
- FWCI
- 9.47
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE) (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- 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 › Artificial Intelligence › Advanced Software Engineering Methodologies
- Keywords
- software evolution, information needs, novice programmers, software tools
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
