Collective Code Bookmarks for Program Comprehension

Collective Code Bookmarks for Program Comprehension

Guzzi, A.
Hattori, L.
Lanza, M.
Pinzger, M.
Van Deursen, A.

Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Software Technology

2011-06-22

The program comprehension research community has been developing useful tools and techniques to support developers in the time-consuming activity of understanding software artifacts. However, the majority of the tools do not bring collective benefit to the team: After gaining the necessary understanding of an artifact (e.g., using a technique based on visualization, feature localization, architecture reconstruction, etc.), developers seldom document what they have learned, thus not sharing their knowledge. We argue that code bookmarking can be effectively used to document a developer’s findings, to retrieve this valuable knowledge later on, and to share the findings with other team members. We present a tool, called POLLICINO, for collective code bookmarking. To gather requirements for our bookmarking tool, we conducted an online survey and interviewed professional software engineers about their current usage and needs of code bookmarks. We describe our approach and the tool we implemented. To assess the tool’s effectiveness, adequacy, and usability, we present an exploratory pre-experimental user study we have performed with 11 participants. Accepted in Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC2011) – IEEE Computer Society

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:b5141a40-7678-407d-a1bd-6e4b268a75f6

Delft University of Technology, Software Engineering Research Group

Technical Report Series TUD-SERG-2011-006

1872-5392

Institutional Repository

report

(c) 2011 The authors. Software Engineering Research Group, Department of Software Technology, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science, Delft University of Technology.