Paper Info
Title
How tools in IDEs shape developers' navigation behavior
Abstract
Understanding source code is crucial for successful software maintenance, and navigating the call graph is especially helpful to understand source code [12]. We compared maintenance performance across four different development environments: an IDE without any call graph exploration tool, a Call Hierarchy tool as found in Eclipse, and the tools Stacksplorer [7]and Blaze [11]. Using any of the call graph exploration tools more developers could solve certain maintenance tasks correctly. Only Stacksplorer and Blaze, however, were also able to decrease task completion times, although the Call Hierarchy offers access to a larger part of the call graph. To investigate if this result was caused by a change in navigation behavior between the tools, we used a set of predictive models to create formally comparable descriptions of programmer navigation. The results suggest that the decrease in task completion times has been caused by Stacksplorer and Blaze promoting call graph navigation more than the Call Hierarchy tool.
Year
DOI
Venue
2013
10.1145/2470654.2466419
CHI
Keywords
Field
DocType
certain maintenance task,call hierarchy tool,programmer navigation,call graph,ides shape developer,task completion time,call graph exploration tool,call hierarchy,navigation behavior,call graph navigation,maintenance performance
Programmer,Software engineering,Source code,Computer science,Call graph,Human–computer interaction,Eclipse,Software maintenance,Task completion,Hierarchy,Operating system
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
8
0.46
22
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Jan-Peter Krämer1534.07
Thorsten Karrer238626.19
Joachim Kurz3201.74
Moritz Wittenhagen41116.81
Jan Borchers51659154.20