On Understanding How Developers Use the Spotter Search Tool

Kubelka, Juraj; Bergel, Alexandre; Chis, Vasile-Andrei; Gîrba, Tudor; Reichhart, Stefan; Robbes, Romain; Syrel, Aliaksei (September 2015). On Understanding How Developers Use the Spotter Search Tool. In: Proceedings of 3rd IEEE Working Conference on Software Visualization - New Ideas and Emerging Results. VISSOFT-NIER'15 (pp. 145-149). IEEE 10.1109/VISSOFT.2015.7332426

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Analyzing how software engineers use the Integrated Development Environment (IDE) is essential to better understanding how engineers carry out their daily tasks. Spotter is a code search engine for the Pharo programming language. Since its inception, Spotter has been rapidly and broadly adopted within the Pharo community. However, little is known about how practitioners employ Spotter to search and navigate within the Pharo code base. This paper evaluates how software engineers use Spotter in practice. To achieve this, we remotely gather user actions called events. These events are then visually rendered using an adequate navigation tool chain. Sequences of events are represented using a visual alphabet. We found a number of usage patterns and identified underused Spotter features. Such findings are essential for improving Spotter.

Item Type:

Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)

Division/Institute:

08 Faculty of Science > Institute of Computer Science (INF)
08 Faculty of Science > Institute of Computer Science (INF) > Software Composition Group (SCG) [discontinued]

UniBE Contributor:

Chis, Vasile-Andrei, Syrel, Aliaksei

Subjects:

000 Computer science, knowledge & systems
500 Science > 510 Mathematics

Series:

VISSOFT-NIER'15

Publisher:

IEEE

Language:

English

Submitter:

Oscar Nierstrasz

Date Deposited:

29 Jun 2016 10:50

Last Modified:

05 Dec 2022 14:56

Publisher DOI:

10.1109/VISSOFT.2015.7332426

Uncontrolled Keywords:

scg-pub scg15, snf-asa1, Andrei Chis, Tudor Girba

BORIS DOI:

10.7892/boris.82282

URI:

https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/82282

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