Title
A field study on fostering structural navigation with prodet
Abstract
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.
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.1109/ICSE.2015.151
ICSE
Keywords
Field
DocType
Software Maintenance, Structural Navigation, Code Recommendation, Field Study
Software engineering,Systems engineering,Computer science,Visualization,Microsoft Visual Studio,Call graph,Software,Plug-in,Software maintenance,Software visualization,Program comprehension
Conference
Volume
ISSN
ISBN
2
0270-5257
978-1-4799-1934-5
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
6
0.43
29
Authors
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Vinay Augustine160.43
Patrick Francis228017.79
Xiao Qu360.43
David Shepherd420415.43
Will Snipes536218.48
Christoph Bräunlich6331.15
Thomas Fritz793067.66