Article

Towards understanding programs through wear-based filtering

Authors:

Mary Czerwinski,

George RobertsonAuthors Info & Claims

SoftVis '05: Proceedings of the 2005 ACM symposium on Software visualization

Pages 183 - 192

https://doi.org/10.1145/1056018.1056044

Published: 14 May 2005 Publication History

Abstract

Large software projects often require a programmer to make changes to unfamiliar source code. This paper presents the results of a formative observational study of seven professional programmers who use a conventional development environment to update an unfamiliar implementation of a commonly known video game. We describe several usability problems they experience, including keeping oriented in the program's source text, maintaining the number and layout of open text documents and relying heavily on textual search for navigation. To reduce the cost of transferring knowledge about the program among developers, we propose the idea of wear-based filtering, a combination of computational wear and social filtering. The development environment collects interaction information, as with computational wear, and uses that information to direct the attention of subsequent users, as with social filtering. We present sketches of new visualizations that use wear-based filtering and demonstrate the feasibility of our approach with data drawn from our study.

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Cited By

Kreber LDiehl S(2023)A Comparative Evaluation of Tabs and Linked Panels for Program Understanding in Augmented Reality2023 IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR)10.1109/ISMAR59233.2023.00017(29-38)Online publication date: 16-Oct-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/ISMAR59233.2023.00017
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cover image ACM Conferences

SoftVis '05: Proceedings of the 2005 ACM symposium on Software visualization

May 2005

211 pages

ISBN:1595930736

DOI:10.1145/1056018

Program Chairs:
Tom Naps
University of Wisconsin - Oshkosh, USA
,
Wim De Pauw
IBM Research, USA

Copyright © 2005 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 14 May 2005

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SOFTVIS05: ACM Symposium on Software Visualization SOFTVIS 2005

May 14 - 15, 2005

Missouri, St. Louis

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Overall Acceptance Rate 20 of 65 submissions, 31%

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https://doi.org/10.1109/ISMAR59233.2023.00017
Wan ZMurphy GXia XGrundy JLe Goues CLo D(2020)Predicting code context models for software development tasksProceedings of the 35th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering10.1145/3324884.3416544(809-820)Online publication date: 21-Dec-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3324884.3416544
Aghayi EMassey ALaToza T(2020)Find Unique Usages: Helping Developers Understand Common Usages2020 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC)10.1109/VL/HCC50065.2020.9127285(1-8)Online publication date: Aug-2020
https://doi.org/10.1109/VL/HCC50065.2020.9127285
Ahrens MSchneider K(2020)Using Eye Tracking Data to Improve Requirements Specification UseRequirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality10.1007/978-3-030-44429-7_3(36-51)Online publication date: 18-Mar-2020
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44429-7_3
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Ahrens MSchneider KBusch MBegel ASiegmund J(2019)Attention in software maintenanceProceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Eye Movements in Programming10.1109/EMIP.2019.00009(2-9)Online publication date: 27-May-2019
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Reddivari SBhowmik T(2018)A Qualitative Investigation of Landmarks in Software Code NavigationProceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Compute and Data Analysis10.1145/3193077.3193091(80-84)Online publication date: 23-Mar-2018
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