Ducky's Homework / Research

I am working for Gail Murphy, looking at programmer productivity. :

~~discovering interesting patterns in programmer/IDE interaction by data mining interaction logs~~ (got stumped trying to find things without knowing what I was looking for; also most data mining techniques involve a small amount of data for a large number of subjects, not a large amount of data for a small number of subjects)
running a user study of novice pairs and experienced pairs of programmers, seeing how long they took to complete a set of ~4 tasks, and figuring out what the successful programmers did that the unsuccessful programmers didn't (realized that randomness plays such a large factor that I wasn't going to find anything interesting)
implementing tabbing behaviour in Eclipse similar to tabbing behaviour in Firefox, giving subjects a little lecture on doing breadth-first instead of depth-first search, and timing new-tab vs. old-tab behavior (someone else already implemented "Firefox" tabbing behaviour)
~~implementing a visualization of coders'navigation history~~
studying how tool support affects navigation patterns

Current TBDs

try out IDEs to see how they do tabbing
- NetBeans: fwd/back buttons; moving to new file always opens new tab; tabs don't move, left/rt arrow to move view of tabs
- JCreator (Windows only)
- Understand Java IDE
- Gel (Windows only, dormant)
- Visual Studio
- BlueJ -- teaching tool; not sure if it scales
Find out what plug-ins the various IDEs have -- code coverage? findbugs? JUnit?
Rob's thesis mentions that 58-81% of web navigation is to previously seen pages [Dumais et al], but passes on saying what % is for source. That would be interesting to try to pull out of Mylar data.
Bannon et al: "[D]igressions are frequent. When a record is made of these commands as they occur temporarily, as in the history list, information on the tasks and goals of the users is lost."

H0: Most of time "wasted" is due to false hypotheses. (is there a ko paper that says so?)
H1: Breadth-first search of the hypothesis space reduces the amount of time spent on false hypotheses on average.
H2: Breadth-first navigation helps BFS => BFN when seeking verification for a hypothesis is on average faster than a depth-first navigation
H3: The following things will result in users using BFN more often.
- H3.1: tabs staying in once place
- H3.2: tabs being containers for a task rather than a file (more like Firefox)
- H3.3: making the back/forward button history only contain what was looked at in that tab, vs. everything in the global history
- H3.3: marking "special" places in the history drop-down with icons
  - classes/methods reached via a search
  - classes/methods reached via the package explorer
  - (Question: what about reached from Outline View? Class Hierarchy view? QuickOutline)
  - (Question: do I want to insert a right arrow if they did declaration and left if they did references? What about a refs/declr search?)
- H3.4: making search results visually distinctive if they have gone there recently
H4: telling people that BFN is a better approach
(H5: telling people to write down three hypotheses is useful)

Potential future study
- Read ethics materials, including Guidelines
- Discuss ethics w/Gail
- Look at previous ethics submissions
- DuckyEthicsDraft

Cross, E. The behavioral styles of computer programmers. in Proc 8th Annual SIGCPR Conference. 1970. Maryland, WA, USA.

Mayer, D.B. and A.W. Stalnaker. Selection and Evaluation of Computer Personnel – the Research History of SIG/CPR. in Proc 1968 23rd ACM National Conference,. 1968. Las Vegas, NV, USA.

Michael McCracken, Vicki Almstrum, Danny Diaz, Mark Guzdial, Dianne Hagan, Yifat Ben- David Kolikant, Cary Laxer, Lynda Thomas, Ian Utting, and Tadeusz Wilusz. A multinational, multi-institutional study of assessment of programming skills of first-year CS students. In Working group reports from ITiCSE on Innovation and technology in computer science education, Canterbury, UK, 2001. ACM Press.

B Adelson and E Soloway. The role of domain experience in software design. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 11(November):1351–1360, 1985.
Jeffrey Bonar and Elliot Soloway. Uncovering principles of novice programming. In 10th ACM POPL, pages 10–13, 1983.