GUI-driven code tracing

Abstract

A significant part of a developer's activity is spent on maintenance tasks, which might involve dealing with unfamiliar code. Especially in these cases, a maintenance task is likely to imply a considerable amount of time locating the relevant source code that needs to be changed. This paper proposes a navigation mechanism for tracing UI elements of a running program to their representation in the source code. The technique relies on instrumenting the program in order to enable navigation from UI elements to locations in the source code. We have developed a prototype implementing the proposed mechanism and performed a user study where programmers were asked to perform maintenance tasks on programs of different sizes. We observed that the proposed mechanism enables fast code location, and that the time spent to accomplish similar tasks does not change significantly as program size increases.