An Exploratory Study of How Developers Seek, Relate, and Collect Relevant Information during Software Maintenance Tasks
- Amy J. Ko, B. Myers, Michael J. Coblenz, H. Aung
- Computer ScienceIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
- 1 December 2006
A study was performed in which developers were given an unfamiliar program and asked to work on two debugging tasks and three enhancement tasks for 70 minutes, suggesting a new model of program understanding grounded in theories of information foraging.
Information Needs in Collocated Software Development Teams
- Amy J. Ko, R. DeLine, Gina Venolia
- Computer ScienceInternational Conference on Software Engineering
- 24 May 2007
This work analyzed software developers' day-to-day information needs at a large software company and transcribed their activities in go-minute sessions to identify information types and cataloged the outcome and source when each type of information was sought.
Let's go to the whiteboard: how and why software developers use drawings
- M. Cherubini, Gina Venolia, R. DeLine, Amy J. Ko
- Computer ScienceInternational Conference on Human Factors in…
- 29 April 2007
Findings from semi-structured interviews that have been validated with a structured survey show that most of the diagrams had a transient nature because of the high cost of changing whiteboard sketches to electronic renderings.
The state of the art in end-user software engineering
- Amy J. Ko, R. Abraham, S. Wiedenbeck
- Computer ScienceACM Computing Surveys
- 1 April 2011
This article summarizes and classifies research on end-user software engineering activities, defining the area of End-User Software Engineering (EUSE) and related terminology, and addresses several crosscutting issues in the design of EUSE tools.
Designing the whyline: a debugging interface for asking questions about program behavior
The Whyline is a prototype Interrogative Debugging interface for the Alice programming environment that visualizes answers in terms of runtime events directly relevant to a programmer's question.
Six Learning Barriers in End-User Programming Systems
A study of beginning programmers learning Visual Basic.NET identified six types of barriers, which inspire a new metaphor of computation, which provides a more learner-centric view of programming system design.
Eliciting design requirements for maintenance-oriented IDEs: a detailed study of corrective and perfective maintenance tasks
- Amy J. Ko, H. Aung, B. Myers
- Computer ScienceProceedings. 27th International Conference on…
- 15 May 2005
A study of expert Java programmers using Eclipse found several trends in maintenance work, as well as many opportunities for new tools that could save programmers up to 35% of the time they currently spend on maintenance tasks.
Natural programming languages and environments
- B. Myers, John F. Pane, Amy J. Ko
- Computer ScienceCommunications of the ACM
- 1 September 2004
The goal is to make it possible for people to express their ideas in the same way they think about them, and to achieve this, the team has performed various studies about how people think about programming tasks, and developed new tools for programming and debugging.
Debugging reinvented
The Whyline is a new kind of debugging tool that enables developers to select a question about program output from a set of why did and why didn't questions derived from the program's code and execution.
Examining task engagement in sensor-based statistical models of human interruptibility
- J. Fogarty, Amy J. Ko, H. Aung, Elspeth Golden, Karen P. Tang, S. Hudson
- Computer ScienceInternational Conference on Human Factors in…
- 2 April 2005
This work examines task engagement by studying programmers working on a realistic programming task and builds a statistical model of interruptibility that can support a reduction in costly interruptions while still allowing systems to convey notifications in a timely manner.
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