Visualizing the Evolution of Working Sets

Abstract

As part of their daily work, developers interact with Integrated Development Environments (IDE), generating thousands of events. Together with other aspects of development, this data also captures the modus operandi of the developer, including all the program entities she interacted with during a development session. This "working set" (or context) is leveraged by developers to create and maintain their mental model of the software system at hand. Understanding how developers navigate and interact with source code during a development session is an open question. We present a novel visual approach to understand how working sets evolve during a development session. The visualization incrementally depicts all the program entities involved in a development session, the intensity of the developer activity on them, and the navigation paths that occurred between them. We visualized about a thousand development sessions, and categorized them according to their visual properties.