How are Java software developers using the Eclipse IDE?

Murphy, Gail C.; Kersten, Mik; Findlater, Leah

doi:10.1109/ms.2006.105

Cited by 346 publications

(204 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…Version control and debug received 23% and 5% vote respectively. 76% participants voted that they use it very frequently during development, as shown in Fig 2. This is consistent with the survey by Murphy et al [12] who observed that code completion menu is one of the top six features used in Eclipse IDE for consuming code specific information. Features voted above code completion in his observation were basic editing functionality whereas our survey focused on features related to consuming information specially provided through IDEs only.…”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 92%

A Content Assist based Approach for Providing Rationale of Method Change for Object Oriented Programming

Ami

Islam²

2015

IJIEEB

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Abstract-Software engineering requires modification of code during development and maintenance phase. During modification, a difficult task is to understand rationale of changed code. Present Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) attempt to help this by providing features integrated with different types of repositories. However, these features still consume developer's time as he has to switch from editor to another window for this purpose. Moreover, these features focus on elements available in present version of code, thus increasing the difficulty of finding rationale of an element removed or modified earlier. Leveraging different sources for providing information through code completion menus has been shown to be valuable, even when compared to standalone counterparts offering similar functionalities in literature. Literature also shows that it is one of the most used features for consuming information within IDE. Based on that, we prepare an Eclipse plug-in and a framework that allows providing reason of code change, at method granularity, across versions through a new code completion menu in IDE. These allow a software engineer to gain insight about rationale of removed or modified methods which are otherwise not available in present version of code. Professional software engineers participated in our empirical evaluation process and we observed that more than 80% participants considered this to be a useful approach for saving time and effort to understand rationale of method change. Later, based on their feedback, the plug-in and framework is modified to incorporate chronological factors. We perform quasi experimental evaluation with professional software engineers. It is found that time required to find rationale of method change is reduced to at least half compared to usual amount of time required for all the software engineers who participated in the quantitative evaluation.

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Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 92%

A Content Assist based Approach for Providing Rationale of Method Change for Object Oriented Programming

Ami

Islam²

2015

IJIEEB

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“…Search and information seeking behavior of software developers has been studied quite extensively in the past (Sillito et al 2006;Ko et al 2006Ko et al , 2007Singer et al 1997;Murphy et al 2006;Sim et al 1998). However, there have been very few studies on search behavior of developers in Internet-Scale code search engines.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Searching for source code constitutes a significant part of a software development activity (Singer et al 1997;Murphy et al 2006). Software developers use a variety of tools to search source code that range from conventional tools such as 'grep' to advanced search facilities in integrated development environments.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Analyzing and mining a code search engine usage log

Bajracharya

Lopes

2010

Empir Software Eng

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This paper presents an analysis of a year long usage log of Koders, the first commercially available Internet-Scale code search engine (http://www.koders.com). The usage log comprises about ten million activities from more than three million users. Analysis of the usage data shows that despite of attracting a large number of visitors, Koders has a very sparse usage and that it lacks regular usage from many of its users. When compared to Web search, search behavior in Koders showed many similar patterns. A topic modeling analysis of the usage data shows what topics users of Koders are looking for. Observations on the prevalence of these topics among the users, and observations on how search and download activities vary across topics, lead to the conclusion that users who find code search engines usable are those who already know to a high level of specificity what to look for. This paper also presents a general categorization of these topics that provides insights on the different ways code search engine users express their queries. It identifies various forms of queries in Koders's log and the kinds of results addressed by the queries. It also provides several suggestions for improvements in code search engines based on the analysis of usage, topics, and query forms. The work presented in this paper is the first of its kind that reveals several insights on the usage of an Internet-Scale code search engine.

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“…Nonetheless, programmers have become efficient on creating and maintaing programs using tool-based IDEs [13], thus we stress that the former is a conceptual problem, which hinders the understanding of the importance of the role of objects in dynamic OOP languages.…”

Section: The Conceptual Problem: Tools Vs Objectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Gaucho programmers create their custom view of the system, by opening the shapes relevant to the task at hand. The environment does not automatically collect the relevant entities, as in Mylin's degree-of-interest model [13], but enables a developer to incrementally populate an infinite surface, which hosts a subset of the complete system. A view in Gaucho represents an arrangement of shapes which form a scene.…”

Section: Task Context Supportmentioning

confidence: 99%