Restructuring software with gestures

2011 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC) Pub Date : 2011-11-10 DOI:10.1109/VLHCC.2011.6070394

E. Murphy-Hill, M. Ayazifar, Andrew P. Black

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引用次数: 27

Abstract

Refactoring is the process of changing the structure of code without changing its meaning, and is a frequent practice among developers. Although programmers refactor frequently, they usually do not use refactoring tools to automate this process. We argue that the need to recall the name of a refactoring before the appropriate tool can be invoked makes it unnecessarily hard to initiate a refactoring with a tool. Conventional ways of initiating a tool also make it hard to transition from novice tool user to expert tool user. The contribution of this paper is a memorable mapping from gestures to refactorings, and an implementation of that mapping in the form of marking menus. In the first reported experiment to explore the effect of the position of items in marking menus on people's ability to infer the location of those items, we asked 16 programmers to complete a paper-based evaluation of our mapping. The results suggest that programmers can infer the gesture that will invoke the appropriate refactoring tool, even if they do not know the name of the refactoring. We also illustrate how marking menus might be used for refactoring during development with two other small studies.

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用手势重组软件

重构是在不改变代码含义的情况下改变代码结构的过程，是开发人员经常采用的做法。尽管程序员经常重构，但他们通常不会使用重构工具来自动化这个过程。我们认为，在调用适当的工具之前，需要回忆起重构的名称，这使得使用工具启动重构变得不必要地困难。传统的启动工具的方式也使得从新手用户到专家用户的过渡变得困难。本文的贡献是从手势到重构的令人难忘的映射，并以标记菜单的形式实现了该映射。在第一个被报道的实验中，我们探索了标记菜单中物品的位置对人们推断这些物品位置的影响，我们要求16名程序员完成一份基于纸张的评估。结果表明，程序员可以推断出调用适当重构工具的手势，即使他们不知道重构的名称。我们还通过另外两个小的研究说明了在开发过程中如何将标记菜单用于重构。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

2011 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC)

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