Explicit programming strategies

Abstract

Software developers solve a diverse and wide range of problems. While software engineering research often focuses on tools to support this problem solving, the strategies that developers use to solve problems are at least as important. In this paper, we offer a novel approach for enabling developers to follow explicit programming strategies that describe how an expert tackles a common programming problem. We define explicit programming strategies, grounding our definition in prior work both within software engineering and in other professions which have adopted more explicit procedures for problem solving. We then present a novel notation called Roboto and a novel strategy tracker tool that explicitly represent programming strategies and frame executing strategies as a collaborative effort between human abilities to make decisions and computer abilities to structure process and persist information. In a formative evaluation, 28 software developers of varying expertise completed a design task and a debugging task. We found that, compared to developers who are free to choose their own strategies, developers given explicit strategies experienced their work as more organized, systematic, and predictable, but also more constrained. Developers using explicit strategies were objectively more successful at the design and debugging tasks. We discuss the implications of Roboto and these findings, envisioning a thriving ecosystem of explicit strategies that accelerate and improve developers' programming problem solving.

An Exploratory Study of Writing and Revising Explicit Programming Strategies

“…We considered unstructured natural language, natural language with hierarchical bulleted lists, and other formats. However, to help make strategies as explicit as possible, we choose a more structured representation used in prior work [22] called Roboto. Roboto is mostly natural language but includes some simple control flow constructs such as conditionals and loops to help strategy users be more systematic.…”

“…However, despite the abundance of knowledge sharing in modern software development, one type of knowledge, programming strategies, is rarely shared, and appears only to be gained through experience or through explicit instruction [34]. Prior work defines strategic knowledge in programming as any highlevel plan for accomplishing a programming task, describing a series of steps or actions to take to accomplish a goal [22]. Programming strategies reflect knowledge which is procedural in nature, describing not specific concepts, patterns, or styles, but instead reflecting how developers act moment-to-moment when faced with goals and challenges.…”

“…Sharing programming strategies could reshape software development and computing education. For example, recent prior work shows that when developers are given explicit programming strategies known to be effective (such as the one shown in Figure 1, which guides developers in following data dependencies to the source of a wrong value) the effectiveness of their work increases by making them more systematic and efficient [22]. Similarly, novices, when given explicit debugging strategies, are far more successful at debugging when they use explicit strategies than when they use their own unsystematic approaches to debugging [21].…”

“…Work has found that researchers can work to represent programming strategies in an explicit form and teach them to novice developers [34]. Studies have found that having an effective programming strategy can have more of an impact on task success than a programmer's knowledge [15,22].…”

“…Teaching novice programmers to follow a strategy to systematically trace execution line-by-line and sketch intermediate values can lead to better performance in predicting the output of short programs [47]. Developers who follow an explicit programming strategy work in a more organized and structured fashion, enabling them to finish their tasks more successfully and in less time [22].…”