Listen Veronica! Can You Give Me a Hand With This Bug?

Abstract

Developing software implies looking for documentation, following tutorials, making implementation decisions, encountering errors, and overcoming them. Behind each aspect is the developer’s reasoning that, if not collected, is lost after the implementation. Conversely, if captured and linked to the code, the developers’ reasoning and motivations for each step they accomplish can become a valuable asset, meaningful for them and other developers. Looking for a mechanism to capture such knowledge seamlessly, we present Veronica. It is a conversational agent integrated directly into Visual Studio Code that, based on the developers’ self-explanatory reasoning, records memos and links them with the code they are writing. Furthermore, Veronica can interact with the web browser to automatically gather the sources consulted by the developer and attach them to the code. We validated our approach by conducting a usability study with eight participants that positively assessed the tool’s usefulness and suggested improvements in the graphical interface.