MylynSDP — Process - aware artifact filtering based on interest

Abstract

A software development process is used by software engineers to guide their activities during all phases of the software product development. When executing a software development process, software engineers may lose time and effort while searching for artifacts or changing contexts. This happens, for example, when they need to search for a specific code file in a list of hundreds of files or when they interrupt an activity to execute another but forget specific details and need to re-execute searches related to the previous activity. This impacts their productivity negatively, because extra time and effort are spent into non-productive work. Therefore, automated assistance is required to mitigate or avoid these issues. The Degree of Interest (DOI) function infers an element’s importance in a context, helping software engineers to handle many artifacts. Mylyn, an Eclipse IDE plugin, uses a DOI function on Java documents to assist programmers when looking for code documents during development. However, Mylyn’s DOI function is limited to the implementation phase of software processes and relies on manual task creation. This paper presents MylynSDP, a software Process-aware extension to Mylyn’s DOI function. MylynSDP’s DOI function infers an artifact’s importance during an activity and filters uninteresting artifacts, reducing the time taken to search items and improving productivity. Mylyn code was augmented, and an evaluation study was performed. Seven subjects executed a software process with many artifacts. Exercise times were recorded for productivity analysis. Subjects answered a Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) questionnaire. New task and artifact creation wizards link tasks and artifacts to specification activities and artifacts, respectively. A new interaction event handles context creation, and the DOI function was extended to other software process phases. Exercise time reduction shows a productivity increase. TAM questionnaire answers show a positive overall willingness to adopt MylynSDP and provide evidence that using a DOI function in different software process phases increases productivity. This work advances the state of the art in software engineering by providing additional methods to support artifact search and discovery, context change management, and artifact relevance mechanisms.