Towards Activity-Aware Tool Support for Change Tasks

Abstract

To complete a change task, software developers perform a number of activities, such as locating and editing the relevant code. While there is a variety of approaches to support developers for change tasks, these approaches mainly focus on a single activity each. Given the wide variety of activities during a change task, a developer has to keep track of and switch between the different approaches. By knowing more about a developer's activities and in particular by knowing when she is working on which activity, we would be able to provide better and more tailored tool support, thereby reducing developer effort.In our research we investigate the characteristics of these activities, whether they can be identified, and whether we can use this additional information to improve developer support for change tasks. We conducted two exploratory studies with a total of 21 software developers collecting data on activities in the lab and field. An empirical analysis of the data shows, amongst other results, that activities comprise a consistently small amount of code elements across all developers and tasks (approx. 8.7 elements). Further analysis of the data shows, that we can automatically detect the boundaries and types of activities, and that the information on activity types can be used to improve the identification of relevant code elements.