Using task context to improve programmer productivity

Abstract

When working on a large software system, a programmer typically spends an inordinate amount of time sifting through thousands of artifacts to find just the subset of information needed to complete an assigned task. All too often, before completing the task the programmer must switch to working on a different task. These task switches waste time as the programmer must repeatedly find and identify the information relevant to the task-at-hand. In this paper, we present a mechanism that captures, models, and persists the elements and relations relevant to a task. We show how our task context model reduces information overload and focuses a programmer's work by filtering and ranking the information presented by the development environment. A task context is created by monitoring a programmer's activity and extracting the structural relationships of program artifacts. Operations on task contexts integrate with development environment features, such as structure display, search, and change management. We have validated our approach with a longitudinal field study of Mylar, our implementation of task context for the Eclipse development environment. We report a statistically significant improvement in the productivity of 16 industry programmers who voluntarily used Mylar for their daily work.

Global Software Engineering: The Future of Socio-technical Coordination

“…Their evaluation shows that the tool finds useful starting points for exploring the code. Kersten et al [45] design a tool, Mylar, that computes a degree of interest for project artifacts, using task context and project history, and provides a filter function to help identify useful artifacts. Bruegge et al [9] take a different tack with their tool, Sisyphus.…”

Replaying past changes in multi-developer projects

“…Although theoretically they could replay the navigation, they do not do it; and even if they did, since the navigation is stored locally, replaying other developers' changes would not be possible. A similar work is Mylyn, a tool that uses interaction data to maintain task context [18]. Mylyn presents the same limitations as NavTracks does: it discards the history of the interactions with the IDE and works only locally.…”

Understanding software artifact provenance

“…For example, unlike most IDEs, the Mylyn plugin for Eclipse models development tasks as a multi-dimensional first-order artifacts; this allows the underlying system to recognize the implicit context of what files, APIs, bug reports, mailing list discussions that may be of interest, based on previous experience of "similar" development tasks [7].…”