How Developers Visualize Compiler Messages: A Foundational Approach to Notification Construction

2014 Second IEEE Working Conference on Software Visualization Pub Date : 2014-09-01 DOI:10.1109/VISSOFT.2014.24

Titus Barik, Kevin Lubick, S. Christie V, E. Murphy-Hill

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引用次数: 14

Abstract

Self-explanation is one cognitive strategy through which developers comprehend error notifications. Self-explanation, when left solely to developers, can result in a significant loss of productivity because humans are imperfect and bounded in their cognitive abilities. We argue that modern IDEs offer limited visual affordances for aiding developers with self-explanation, because compilers do not reveal their reasoning about the causes of errors to the developer. The contribution of our paper is a foundational set of visual annotations that aid developers in better comprehending error messages when compilers expose their internal reasoning. We demonstrate through a user study of 28 undergraduate Software Engineering students that our annotations align with the way in which developers self-explain error notifications. We show that these annotations allow developers to give significantly better self-explanations when compared against today's dominant visualization paradigm, and that better self-explanations yield better mental models of notifications. The results of our work suggest that the diagrammatic techniques developers use to explain problems can serve as an effective foundation for how IDEs should visually communicate to developers.

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开发者如何可视化编译器消息:通知构造的基本方法

自我解释是开发人员理解错误通知的一种认知策略。自我解释，如果只留给开发人员，可能会导致生产力的重大损失，因为人类是不完美的，他们的认知能力是有限的。我们认为，现代ide为帮助开发人员进行自我解释提供了有限的可视化支持，因为编译器不会向开发人员透露它们对错误原因的推理。我们论文的贡献是一组基本的可视化注释，帮助开发人员在编译器暴露其内部推理时更好地理解错误消息。通过对28名软件工程专业本科生的用户研究，我们证明了我们的注释与开发人员自我解释错误通知的方式是一致的。我们表明，与当今占主导地位的可视化范例相比，这些注释允许开发人员提供更好的自我解释，并且更好的自我解释产生更好的通知心理模型。我们的工作结果表明，开发人员用来解释问题的图表技术可以作为ide如何可视化地与开发人员沟通的有效基础。

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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2014 Second IEEE Working Conference on Software Visualization

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