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Mine2015b
Conference paper (in proceedings)

I know what you did last summer : an investigation of how developers spend their time

  • Minelli, Roberto ORCID Istituto del software (SI), Facoltà di scienze informatiche, Università della Svizzera italiana, Svizzera
  • Mocci, Andrea ORCID Istituto del software (SI), Facoltà di scienze informatiche, Università della Svizzera italiana, Svizzera
  • Lanza, Michele ORCID Istituto del software (SI), Facoltà di scienze informatiche, Università della Svizzera italiana, Svizzera
  • 2015
Published in:
  • Proceedings of ICPC 2015 (23rd IEEE International Conference on Program Comprehension). - 2015, p. 25–35
Interaction data
IDE
Integrated Development Environment
Software Evolution
Program comprehension
Program understanding
English Developing software is a complex mental activity, requiring extensive technical knowledge and abstraction capabilities. The tangible part of development is the use of tools to read, inspect, edit, and manipulate source code, usually through an IDE (integrated development environment). Common claims about software development include that program comprehension takes up half of the time of a developer, or that certain UI (user interface) paradigms of IDEs offer insufficient support to developers. Such claims are often based on anecdotal evidence, throwing up the question of whether they can be corroborated on more solid grounds. We present an in-depth analysis of how developers spend their time, based on a fine-grained IDE interaction dataset consisting of ca. 740 development sessions by 18 developers, amounting to 200 hours of development time and 5 million of IDE events. We propose an inference model of development activities to precisely measure the time spent in editing, navigating and searching for artifacts, interacting with the UI of the IDE, and performing corollary activities, such as inspection and debugging. We report several interesting findings which in part confirm and reinforce some common claims, but also disconfirm other beliefs about software development.
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Language
  • English
Classification
Computer science and technology
License
License undefined
Open access status
green
Identifiers
Persistent URL
https://n2t.net/ark:/12658/srd1328164
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