Maintaining mental models: a study of developer work habits

ABSTRACT

To understand developers' typical tools, activities, and practices and their satisfaction with each, we conducted two surveys and eleven interviews. We found that many problems arose because developers were forced to invest great effort recovering implicit knowledge by exploring code and interrupting teammates and this knowledge was only saved in their memory. Contrary to expectations that email and IM prevent expensive task switches caused by face-to-face interruptions, we found that face-to-face communication enjoys many advantages. Contrary to expectations that documentation makes understanding design rationale easy, we found that current design documents are inadequate. Contrary to expectations that code duplication involves the copy and paste of code snippets, developers reported several types of duplication. We use data to characterize these and other problems and draw implications for the design of tools for their solution.

References

1. de Souza, C. R., Redmiles, D., Cheng, L., Millen, D., and Patterson, J. 2004. Sometimes you need to see through walls: a field study of application programming interfaces. In Proceedings of the 2004 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (Chicago, Illinois, USA, November 06 - 10, 2004), 63--71.
2. Hertzum, M. & Pejtersen, A. M. The information-seeking practices of engineers: searching for documents as well as for people. Information Processing and Management, 36, 5, 761--778, 2000.
3. Kamiya, T., Kusumoto, S., and Inoue, K. CCFinder: a multilinguistic token-based code clone detection system for large scale source code. TSE, 28, 7 (Jul. 2002), 654--670.
4. Kiczales, G., Lamping, J., Mendhekar, A., Maeda, C., Videira Lopes, C., Loingtier, J.-M., and Irwin, J. Aspect Oriented Programming. In Proceedings of ECOOP, 1997.
5. Kim, M., Bergman, L, Lau, T., and Notkin, D. An Ethnographic Stud of Copy and Paste Programming Practices in OOPL. International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering, 2004.
6. Kim, M., Sazawal, V., Notkin, D., and Murphy, G.C. An Empirical Study of Code Clone Genealogies. FSE 2005.
7. Moran, T. P. and Carroll, J. M., Eds. Design rationale: concepts, techniques, and use. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc, 1996.
8. Parnas, D.L. On ICSE's "Most Influential Papers". In ACM Software Engineering Notes, 20, 3, July 1995, 29--32.
9. Perry, D., Staudenmayer, N., and Votta, L. G. People, Organizations, and Process Improvement. IEEE Software, 11, 4, 36--45, 1994.
10. Rosson, M.B., and Carroll, J.M. The Reuse of Uses in Smalltalk Programming. ACM Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction, 3, 3, 219--253, 1996.
11. Schwaber, K, & Beedle, M. Agile Software Development with Scrum. Prentice Hall, 2001.
12. Singer, J., Lethbridge, T., Vinson, N., and Anquetil, N. An Examination of Software Engineering Work Practices. In Proceedings of CASCON '97, 209--223, 1997.
13. Weiser, M. 1981. Program slicing. In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Software Engineering (San Diego, California, United States, March 09 - 12, 1981), 439--449.
14. Wright, G. and Ayton, P. Eliciting and Modeling Expert Knowledge In Decision Support Systems, Vol. 3, 13--26, 1987.

Index Terms

• Software and its engineering

  • Software creation and management

    • Collaboration in software development

      • Programming teams

    • Software post-development issues

      • Documentation

  • Software notations and tools

    • Development frameworks and environments

      • Integrated and visual development environments