Consensus task interaction trace recommender to guide developers’ software navigation

Abstract

Developers must complete change tasks on large software systems for maintenance and development purposes. Having a custom software system with numerous instances that meet the growing client demand for features and functionalities increases the software complexity. Developers, especially newcomers, must spend a significant amount of time navigating through the source code and switching back and forth between files in order to understand such a system and find the parts relevant for performing current tasks. This navigation can be difficult, time-consuming and affect developers’ productivity. To help guide developers’ navigation towards successfully resolving tasks with minimal time and effort, we present a task-based recommendation approach that exploits aggregated developers’ interaction traces. Our novel approach, Consensus Task Interaction Trace Recommender (CITR), recommends file(s)-to-edit that help perform a set of tasks based on a tasks-related set of interaction traces obtained from developers who performed similar change tasks on the same or different custom instances of the same system. Our approach uses a consensus algorithm, which takes as input task-related interaction traces and recommends a consensus task interaction trace that developers can use to complete given similar change tasks that require editing (a) common file(s). To evaluate the efficiency of our approach, we perform three different evaluations. The first evaluation measures the accuracy of CITR recommendations. In the second evaluation, we assess to what extent CITR can help developers by conducting an observational controlled experiment in which two groups of developers performed evaluation tasks with and without the recommendations of CITR. In the third and last evaluation, we compare CITR to a state-of-the-art recommendation approach, MI. Results report with statistical significance that CITR can correctly recommend on average 73% of the files to be edited. Furthermore, they show that CITR can increase developers’ successful task completion rate. CITR outperforms MI by an average of 31% higher recommendation accuracy.