During software development and maintenance, developers spend a considerable amount of time on program comprehension activities. Previous studies show that program comprehension takes up as much as half of a developer’s time. However, most of these studies are performed in a controlled setting, or with a small number of participants, and investigate the program comprehension activities only within the IDEs. However, developers’ program comprehension activities go well beyond their IDE interactions. In this paper, we extend our ActivitySpace framework to collect and analyze Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) data across many applications (not just the IDEs). We follow Minelli et al.’s approach to assign developers’ activities into four categories: navigation, editing, comprehension, and other. We then measure the comprehension time by calculating the time that developers spend on program comprehension, e.g., inspecting console and breakpoints in IDE, or reading and understanding tutorials in web browsers. Using this approach, we can perform a more realistic investigation of program comprehension activities, through a field study of program comprehension in practice across a total of seven real projects, on 78 professional developers, and amounting to 3,148 working hours. Our study leverages interaction data that is collected across many applications by the developers. Our study finds that on average developers spend $\sim$ 58 percent of their time on program comprehension activities, and that they frequently use web browsers and document editors to perform program comprehension activities. We also investigate the impact of programming language, developers’ experience, and project phase on the time that is spent on program comprehension, and we find senior developers spend significantly less percentages of time on program comprehension than junior developers. Our study also highlights the importance of several research directions needed to reduce program comprehension time, e.g., building automatic detection and improvement of low quality code and documentation, construction of software-engineering-specific search engines, designing better IDEs that help developers navigate code and browse information more efficiently, etc.

https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4781&context=sis_research

Measuring Program Comprehension: A Large-Scale Field Study with Professionals

Today's integrated development environments (IDEs) are hampered by their dependence on files and file-based editing. We propose a novel user interface that is based on collections of lightweight editable fragments, called bubbles, which when grouped together form concurrently visible working sets. In this paper we describe the design of a prototype IDE user interface for Java based on working sets. A quantitative evaluation shows that developers could expect to view a sizeable number of functions concurrently with relatively few UI operations. A qualitative user evaluation with 23 professional developers indicates a high level of excitement, interest, and potential benefits and uses.

/pdf/code-bubbles-rethinking-the-user-interface-paradigm-of-24lk3zepc9.pdf

Code bubbles: rethinking the user interface paradigm of integrated development environments

Developing software is a complex mental activity, requiring extensive technical knowledge and abstraction capabilities. The tangible part of development is the use of tools to read, inspect, edit, and manipulate source code, usually through an IDE (integrated development environment). Common claims about software development include that program comprehension takes up half of the time of a developer, or that certain UI (user interface) paradigms of IDEs offer insufficient support to developers. Such claims are often based on anecdotal evidence, throwing up the question of whether they can be corroborated on more solid grounds. We present an in-depth analysis of how developers spend their time, based on a fine-grained IDE interaction dataset consisting of ca. 740 development sessions by 18 developers, amounting to 200 hours of development time and 5 million of IDE events. We propose an inference model of development activities to precisely measure the time spent in editing, navigating and searching for artifacts, interacting with the UI of the IDE, and performing corollary activities, such as inspection and debugging. We report several interesting findings which in part confirm and reinforce some common claims, but also disconfirm other beliefs about software development.

/pdf/i-know-what-you-did-last-summer-an-investigation-of-how-3zxclzzocc.pdf

I know what you did last summer: an investigation of how developers spend their time

We present Code Space, a system that contributes touch + air gesture hybrid interactions to support co-located, small group developer meetings by democratizing access, control, and sharing of information across multiple personal devices and public displays. Our system uses a combination of a shared multi-touch screen, mobile touch devices, and Microsoft Kinect sensors. We describe cross-device interactions, which use a combination of in-air pointing for social disclosure of commands, targeting and mode setting, combined with touch for command execution and precise gestures. In a formative study, professional developers were positive about the interaction design, and most felt that pointing with hands or devices and forming hand postures are socially acceptable. Users also felt that the techniques adequately disclosed who was interacting and that existing social protocols would help to dictate most permissions, but also felt that our lightweight permission feature helped presenters manage incoming content.

/pdf/code-space-touch-air-gesture-hybrid-interactions-for-mjo0eip2qk.pdf

Code space: touch + air gesture hybrid interactions for supporting developer meetings

Profilers help developers to find and fix performance problems. But do they find performance bugs -- performance problems that real users actually notice? In this paper we argue that -- especially in the case of interactive applications -- traditional profilers find irrelevant problems but fail to find relevant bugs.We then introduce lag hunting, an approach that identifies perceptible performance bugs by monitoring the behavior of applications deployed in the wild. The approach transparently produces a list of performance issues, and for each issue provides the developer with information that helps in finding the cause of the problem.We evaluate our approach with an experiment where we monitor an application used by 24 users for 1958 hours over the course of 3-months. We characterize the resulting 881 issues, and we find and fix the causes of a set of representative examples.

Catch me if you can: performance bug detection in the wild

Developers spend significant time reading and navigating code fragments spread across multiple locations. The file-based nature of contemporary IDEs makes it prohibitively difficult to create and maintain a simultaneous view of such fragments. We propose a novel user interface metaphor for code understanding based on collections of lightweight, editable fragments called bubbles, which form concurrently visible working sets. We present the results of a qualitative usability evaluation, and the results of a quantitative study which indicates Code Bubbles significantly improved code understanding time, while reducing navigation interactions over a widely-used IDE, for two controlled tasks.

/pdf/code-bubbles-a-working-set-based-interface-for-code-3cvwcxtwzd.pdf

Code bubbles: a working set-based interface for code understanding and maintenance

Today's integrated development environments (IDEs) are hampered by their dependence on files and file-based editing. We propose a novel user interface that is based on collections of lightweight editable fragments, called bubbles, which when grouped together form concurrently visible working sets. We describe the design of a prototype IDE user interface for Java based on working sets.

/pdf/a-research-demonstration-of-code-bubbles-2nyt7ydm7i.pdf

A research demonstration of code bubbles

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Code bubbles: rethinking the user interface paradigm of integrated development environments

Code bubbles: a working set-based interface for code understanding and maintenance

A research demonstration of code bubbles