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Making video tutorials fully interactive by leveraging IDE interaction data

Work fragmentation is a common phenomenon in the workspace, and is detrimental to the actual work taking place. To measure and study the impact of work fragmentation in software development, several studies exploited interaction data, i.e., the data generated by the events performed by the developers in the IDE. However, the absence of information on activities performed outside the IDE could lead to a misclassification of development time. In fact, sometimes leaving the IDE is not an interruption of the task at hand, e.g., when consulting API documentation, or when discussing with colleagues in ad-hoc collaboration applications. In this paper, we propose Ferax, a data analytics platform that developers can leverage for retrospection and possibly to improve their productivity. The capabilities of Ferax are twofold: First, it extends Tako, a profiler to record IDE interaction data for Visual Studio Code, with information about which applications were used and which websites were visited. Second, to enable the understanding of productivity and interruptions on developer sessions, Ferax provides interactive visualizations that show the detailed sequence of events inside and outside the IDE, the switches the developer performs by classifying them as productive or possible interruptions, and the time distribution for application usage. As a preliminary evaluation of Ferax we have collected and analyzed real development sessions from a set of master students and two professional developers. We illustrate how a developer can leverage Ferax to characterize her usual habits, to elicit the impact of interruptions, and to better characterize sessions which were only apparently unproductive.

Alexander Fischer · Master of Science in Software & Data Engineering

Programming skills are essential but not enough to develop large and complex software systems that require the coordination of a team of specialists. Software engineering is about the development of such moderns software systems. Students will learn to go beyond programming, to coordinate a team, to apply modern methodologies and techniques.

Valerie Burgener · Master of Science in Software & Data Engineering

Aldo Gabriele Di Rosa · Master of Science in Software & Data Engineering

Building a data platform on the network of firms that supports geo and temporal analysis

Lucas Pennati · Master of Science in Software & Data Engineering