Best Paper Award

While coding, developers construct and maintain mental models of software systems to support the task at hand. Although source code is the main product of software development, the process involves navigating and inspecting entities beyond the ones that are edited by the end of a task. Developers use various user interfaces (UI) offered by the Integrated Development Environment (IDE) to navigate the complex, and often hidden, relationships between program entities. These UIs impose fixed navigation costs, in terms of the number of interactions that a developer is required to perform to reach an entity of interest. It is unclear to what extent the actual navigation effort differs from an ideal setting, and if there is any room for actual improvement. We present a preliminary empirical study, where we analyzed a corpus of IDE interaction data coming from 6 developers totaling more than 20 days of development activity. To measure the navigation efficiency, we compute a combination of different ideal settings and compare them against the observed navigation events. Our findings reveal that, on average, developers perform 1.5 to 19 times more navigation events than the ideal case. While different factors make the ideal setting unfeasible, we believe that this calls for novel approaches to support the navigation in integrated development environments.

We consider the problem of run-time discovery and continuous monitoring of new components that live in an open environment. We focus on extracting a formal model—which may not be available upfront—by observing the behavior of the running component. We show how the model built at run time can be enriched through new observations (dynamic model update). We also use the inferred model to perform run-time verification. That is, we try to identify if any changes are made to the component that modify its original behavior, contradict the previous observations, and invalidate the inferred model.