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Contribution Details

Type Conference or Workshop Paper
Scope Discipline-based scholarship
Published in Proceedings Yes
Title A Field Study on Fostering Structural Navigation with Prodet
Organization Unit
Authors
  • Vinay Augustine
  • Patrick Francis
  • Xiao Qu
  • David Shepherd
  • Will Snipes
  • Christoph Bräunlich
  • Thomas Fritz
Presentation Type paper
Item Subtype Original Work
Refereed Yes
Status Published in final form
Language
  • English
Page Range 229 - 238
Event Title International Conference on Software Engineering, Software Engineering in Practice
Event Type conference
Event Location Florence, Italy
Event Start Date May 20 - 2015
Event End Date May 22 - 2015
Place of Publication Piscataway, NJ, USA
Publisher IEEE Press
Abstract Text Past studies show that developers who navigate code in a structural manner complete tasks faster and more correctly than those whose behavior is more opportunistic. The goal of this work is to move professional developers towards more effective program comprehension and maintenance habits by providing an approach that fosters structural code navigation. To this end, we created a Visual Studio plugin called Prodet that integrates an always-on navigable visualization of the most contextually relevant portions of the call graph. We evaluated the effectiveness of our approach by deploying it in a six week field study with professional software developers. The study results show a statistically significant increase in developers’ use of structural navigation after installing Prodet. The results also show that developers continuously used the filtered and navigable call graph over the three week period in which it was deployed in production. These results indicate the maturity and value of our approach to increase developers’ effectiveness in a practical and professional environment.
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