Lorenzo Baracchi

Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) have become the de facto standard vehicle to develop software systems. The user interface (UI) of an IDE offers a staggering amount of facilities to manipulate source code, such as inspectors, debuggers, recommenders, alternative viewers, etc. It is unclear how developers use the UI of an IDE and whether such UIs actually give appropriate support to the developers. We present a visual approach to understand and characterize development sessions from the UI perspective. The tool supporting our approach mines and processes the finest-grained UI-level events making up development sessions and presents them visually. We have collected, visualized, and analyzed hundreds of development sessions and report on our findings.

Most development activities, like program understanding, source code navigation and editing, are supported by Integrated Development Environments (IDEs). They provide different tools and user interfaces (UI) to interact with the source code, such as browsers, debuggers, and inspectors. It is uncertain how and when programmers use different UI elements of an IDE and to what extent they appropriately support development. Previously we developed DFLOW, a tool that seamlessly records and processes interaction data. Our long-term goal is to assess to what extent the UIs of IDEs support the workflow of developers and whether they can be improved. As a first step we present our approach to analyze development sessions in the form of visual storytelling. We illustrate our initial catalogue of visualizations through two development stories.