Inconsistency management for multiple-view software developmentenvironments

Developers need tool support to help manage the wide range of inconsistencies that occur during software development. Such tools need to provide developers with ways to define, detect, record, present, interact with, monitor and resolve complex inconsistencies between different views of software artifacts, different developers and different phases of software development. This paper describes our experience with building complex multiple-view software development tools that support diverse inconsistency management facilities. We describe software architectures that we have developed and user interface techniques that are used in our multiple-view development tools, and we discuss the effectiveness of our approaches compared to other architectural and HCI techniques     

How are Java software developers using the Elipse IDE?

The Eclipse integrated development environment continues to gain popularity among Java developers. Our usage monitoring approach allows tool builders to sample how developers are using their tools in the wild. The data gathered about tool use can be used to prevent feature bloat and to evolve the environments according to user needs. Information about how developers work in a development environment can also provide a baseline for assessing new software development tools. We hope this report provides a start in defining which in formation to collect and distribute on an on going basis to help improve Eclipse and other similar platforms and tools.     

Providing end-user facilities to simplify ontology-driven web application authoring

Generally speaking, emerging web-based technologies are mostly intended for professional developers. They pay poor attention to users who have no programming abilities but need to customize software applications. At some point, such needs force end-users to act as designers in various aspects of software authoring and development. Every day, more new computing-related professionals attempt to create and modify existing applications in order to customize web-based artifacts that will help them carry out their daily tasks. In general they are domain experts rather than skilled software designers, and new authoring mechanisms are needed in order that they can accomplish their tasks properly. The work we present is an effort to supply end-users with easy mechanisms for authoring web-based applications. To complement this effort, we present a user study showing that it is possible to carry out a trade-off between expressiveness and ease of use in order to provide end-users with authoring facilities.     

An empirical study of the state of the practice and acceptance of model-driven engineering in four industrial cases

Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) has been promoted for many years as a means for handling the complexity of software development by raising the abstraction level and automating labor-intensive and error-prone tasks. However, there is little empirical evidence of the acceptance of MDE in industry which is the subject of this paper. The goal of this empirical study was to investigate the state of the practice of applying MDE and factors considered as important for its adoption. The subjects were developers of four large companies participating in a research project. The collected data came from multiple sources and covered the results of tool evaluations, interviews, and a survey. Among the factors, we found perceived usefulness, ease of use and the maturity of the tools to be important determinants for the adoption of MDE. We also discuss challenges with adopting MDE and present suggestions on how to succeed with the adoption process.     

A data-oriented profiler to assist in data partitioning and distribution for heterogeneous memory in HPC

Profiling is of great assistance in understanding and optimizing an application’s behavior. Today’s profiling techniques help developers focus on the pieces of code leading to the highest penalties according to a given performance metric. In this paper we describe a profiling tool we have developed by extending the Valgrind framework and one of its tools: Callgrind. Our extended profiling tool provides new object-differentiated profiling capabilities that help software developers and hardware designers (1) understand access patterns, (2) identify unexpected access patterns, and (3) determine whether a particular memory object is consistently featuring a troublesome access pattern. We use this tool to assist in the partition of big data objects so that smaller portions of them can be placed in small, fast memory subsystems of heterogeneous memory systems such as scratchpad memories. We showcase the potential benefits of this technique by means of the XSBench miniapplication from the CESAR codesign project. The benefits include being able to identify the optimal portion of data to be placed in a small scratchpad memory, leading to more than 19% performance improvement, compared with nonassisted partitioning approaches, in our proposed scratchpad-equipped compute node.     

Studying the co-evolution of production and test code in open source and industrial developer test processes through repository mining

Many software production processes advocate rigorous development testing alongside functional code writing, which implies that both test code and production code should co-evolve. To gain insight in the nature of this co-evolution, this paper proposes three views (realized by a tool called TeMo) that combine information from a software project’s versioning system, the size of the various artifacts and the test coverage reports. We validate these views against two open source and one industrial software project and evaluate our results both with the help of log messages, code inspections and the original developers of the software system. With these views we could recognize different co-evolution scenarios (i.e., synchronous and phased) and make relevant observations for both developers as well as test engineers.     

The impacts of quality and productivity perceptions on the use of software process improvement innovations

Numerous software process improvement (SPI) innovations have been proposed to improve software development productivity and system quality; however, their diffusion in practice has been disappointing. This research investigates the adoption of the Personal Software Process on industrial software projects. Quantitative and qualitative analyses reveal that perceived increases in software quality and development productivity, project management benefits, and innovation fit to development tasks, enhance the usefulness of the innovation to developers. Results underscore the need to enrich current technology acceptance models with these constructs, and serve to encourage project managers to adopt formal SPI methods if developers perceive the methods will have positive impacts on their productivity and system quality.     

Refining code ownership with synchronous changes

When mining software repositories, two distinct sources of information are usually explored: the history log and snapshots of the system. Results of analyses derived from these two sources are biased by the frequency with which developers commit their changes. We argue that the usage of mainstream SCM (software configuration management) systems influences the way that developers work. For example, since it is tedious to resolve conflicts due to parallel commits, developers tend to minimize conflicts by not contemporarily modifying the same file. This however defeats one of the purposes of such systems. We mine repositories created by our tool Syde, which records changes in a central repository whenever a file is compiled locally in the IDE (integrated development environment) by any developer in a multi-developer project. This new source of information can augment the accuracy of analyses and breaks new ground in terms of how such information can assist developers. We illustrate how the information we mine provides a refined notion of code ownership with respect to the one inferred by SCM system data. We demonstrate our approach on three case studies, including an industrial one. Ownership models suffer from the assumption that developers have a perfect memory. To account for their imperfect memory, we integrate into our ownership measurement a model of memory retention, to simulate the effect of memory loss over time. We evaluate the characteristics of this model for several strengths of memory.     

Extracting and analyzing time-series HCI data from screen-captured task videos

Recent years have witnessed the increasing emphasis on human aspects in software engineering research and practices. Our survey of existing studies on human aspects in software engineering shows that screen-captured videos have been widely used to record developers’ behavior and study software engineering practices. The screen-captured videos provide direct information about which software tools the developers interact with and which content they access or generate during the task. Such Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) data can help researchers and practitioners understand and improve software engineering practices from human perspective. However, extracting time-series HCI data from screen-captured task videos requires manual transcribing and coding of videos, which is tedious and error-prone. In this paper we report a formative study to understand the challenges in manually transcribing screen-captured videos into time-series HCI data. We then present a computer-vision based video scraping technique to automatically extract time-series HCI data from screen-captured videos. We also present a case study of our scvRipper tool that implements the video scraping technique using 29-hours of task videos of 20 developers in two development tasks. The case study not only evaluates the runtime performance and robustness of the tool, but also performs a detailed quantitative analysis of the tool’s ability to extract time-series HCI data from screen-captured task videos. We also study the developer’s micro-level behavior patterns in software development from the quantitative analysis.     

Predicting source code changes by mining change history

Software developers are often faced with modification tasks that involve source which is spread across a code base. Some dependencies between source code, such as those between source code written in different languages, are difficult to determine using existing static and dynamic analyses. To augment existing analyses and to help developers identify relevant source code during a modification task, we have developed an approach that applies data mining techniques to determine change patterns - sets of files that were changed together frequently in the past - from the change history of the code base. Our hypothesis is that the change patterns can be used to recommend potentially relevant source code to a developer performing a modification task. We show that this approach can reveal valuable dependencies by applying the approach to the Eclipse and Mozilla open source projects and by evaluating the predictability and interestingness of the recommendations produced for actual modification tasks on these systems.     

Detecting Coordination Problems in Collaborative Software Development Environments

Software development is rarely an individual effort and generally involves teams of developers collaborating to generate good reliable code. Among the software code there exist technical dependencies that arise from software components using services from other components. The different ways of assigning the design, development, and testing of these software modules to people can cause various coordination problems among them. We claim that the collaboration of the developers, designers and testers must be related to and governed by the technical task structure. These collaboration practices are handled in what we call Socio-Technical Patterns.

The TESNA project (Technical Social Network Analysis) we report on in this paper addresses this issue. We propose a method and a tool that a project manager can use in order to detect the socio-technical coordination problems. We test the method and tool in a case study of a small and innovative software product company.     

The SEXTANT Software Exploration Tool

In this paper, we discuss a set of functional requirements for software exploration tools and provide initial evidence that various combinations of these features are needed to effectively assist developers in understanding software. We observe that current tools for software exploration only partly support these features. This has motivated the development of SEXTANT, a software exploration tool tightly integrated into the Eclipse IDE that has been developed to fill this gap. By means of case studies, we demonstrate how the requirements fulfilled by SEXTANT are conducive to an understanding needed to perform a maintenance task     

DropsBox: the Dresden Open Software Toolbox

The Dresden Open Software Toolbox (DropsBox) is a software modelling toolbox consisting of a set of open source tools developed by the Software Technology Group at TU Dresden. The DropsBox is built on top of the Eclipse Platform and the Eclipse Modeling Framework. The DropsBox contributes to the development and application of domain-specific language changes (DSLs) in model-driven software development. It can be customised by tool and language developers to support various activities of a DSL’s life cycle ranging from language design to language application and evolution. In this paper, we provide an overview of the DSL life cycle, the DropsBox tools, and their interaction on a common example. Furthermore, we discuss our experiences in developing and integrating tools for DropsBox in an academic environment.     

Using Developer Activity Data to Enhance Awareness during Collaborative Software Development

Software development is a global activity unconstrained by the bounds of time and space. A major effect of this increasing scale and distribution is that the shared understanding that developers previously acquired by formal and informal face-to-face meetings is difficult to obtain. This paper proposes a shared awareness model that uses information gathered automatically from developer IDE interactions to make explicit orderings of tasks, artefacts and developers that are relevant to particular work contexts in collaborative, and potentially distributed, software development projects. The research findings suggest that such a model can be used to: identify entities (developers, tasks, artefacts) most associated with a particular work context in a software development project; identify relevance relationships amongst tasks, developers and artefacts e.g. which developers and artefacts are currently most relevant to a task or which developers have contributed to a task over time; and, can be used to identify potential bottlenecks in a project through a ‘social graph’ view. Furthermore, this awareness information is captured and provided as developers work in different locations and at different times.     

Answering software evolution questions: An empirical evaluation

ContextDevelopers often need to find answers to questions regarding the evolution of a system when working on its code base. While their information needs require data analysis pertaining to different repository types, the source code repository has a pivotal role for program comprehension tasks. However, the coarse-grained nature of the data stored by commit-based software configuration management systems often makes it challenging for a developer to search for an answer.ObjectiveWe present Replay, an Eclipse plug-in that allows developers to explore the change history of a system by capturing the changes at a finer granularity level than commits, and by replaying the past changes chronologically inside the integrated development environment, with the source code at hand.MethodWe conducted a controlled experiment to empirically assess whether Replay outperforms a baseline (SVN client in Eclipse) on helping developers to answer common questions related to software evolution.ResultsThe experiment shows that Replay leads to a decrease in completion time with respect to a set of software evolution comprehension tasks.ConclusionWe conclude that there are benefits in using Replay over the state of the practice tools for answering questions that require fine-grained change information and those related to recent changes.     

Understanding the gap between software process practices and actual practice in very small companies

This paper reports on a grounded theory to study into software developers’ use of software development processes in actual practice in the specific context of very small companies. This study was conducted in three very small software product companies located in Ecuador. The data collection was based on semi-structured qualitative interviews with software project managers, focus group with software developers and was supplemented by the literature and document studies. We interviewed two types of participants (managers and developers), so as to ensure that we elicited a holistic perspective of how they approached the software development process in actual practice. The goal was to study what practices are actually used and their opinion and attitude toward the potential adopting of an international standard (ISO/IEC 29110) specifically designed for very small companies. With the collected data, we performed an analysis utilizing grounded theory coding techniques, as this methodology promotes the focus on uncovering the real concerns of the participants. This study highlighted three areas of concern: customer, software product and development tasks coordination and tracking. The findings in this study give an insight toward the work products as they relate to software development process practices in very small companies and the important factors that must be considered to assist project success.     

基于Eclipse嵌入式系统调试软件的设计

基于Eclipse平台的嵌入式软件开发调试工具对于嵌入式系统软件开发具有重要意义,但目前基于Eclipse平台的嵌入式开发调试工具实现不多.针对这种情况,提出了使用Eclipse平台及其插件技术进行嵌入式调试工具软件的开发,实现了支持嵌入式多核系统的调试工具软件MDSPTool,能够与嵌入式开发平台WorkBench完全无缝集成.实验结果表明, MDSPTool调试工具提供了优良的用户界面,便捷的并行调试方法,高度集成的系统监测功能,从而提高了嵌入式软件开发效率.     

Supporting comprehension of unfamiliar programs by modeling cues

Developers need to comprehend a program before modifying it. In such cases, developers use cues to establish the relevance of a piece of information with a task. Being familiar with different kinds of cues will help the developers to comprehend a program faster. But unlike the experienced developers, novice developers fail to recognize the relevant cues, because (a) there are many cues and (b) they might be unfamiliar with the artifacts. However, not much is known about the developers’ choice of cue. Hence, we conducted two independent studies to understand the kind of cues used by the developers and how a tool influences their cue selection. First, from our user study on two common comprehension tasks, we found that developers actively seek the cues and their cue source choices are similar but task dependent. In our second exploratory study, we investigated whether an integrated development environment (IDE) influences a developer’s cue choices. By observing their interaction history while fixing bugs in Eclipse IDE, we found that the IDE’s influence on their cue choices was not statistically significant. Finally, as a case in point, we propose a novel task-specific program summarization approach to aid novice developers in comprehending an unfamiliar program. Our approach used developers cue choices to synthesize the summaries. A comparison of the synthesized summaries with the summaries recorded by the developers shows both had similar content. This promising result encourages us to explore task-specific cue models, which can aid novice developers to accomplish complex comprehension tasks faster.