Authors
Vinay Augustine, Patrick Francis, Xiao Qu, David Shepherd, Will Snipes, Christoph Braunlich, Thomas Fritz
Publication date
2015/5/16
Conference
2015 IEEE/ACM 37th IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering
Volume
2
Pages
229-238
Publisher
IEEE
Description
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 …
Total citations
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Scholar articles
V Augustine, P Francis, X Qu, D Shepherd, W Snipes… - 2015 IEEE/ACM 37th IEEE International Conference on …, 2015