Timespace in the workplace: dealing with interruptions
CHI '95 Conference Companion on Human Factors in Computing Systems
SHriMP views: an interactive environment for information visualization and navigation
CHI '02 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Interrupts: Just a Minute Never Is
IEEE Software
Hypothesis-Driven Understanding Processes During Corrective Maintenance of Large Scale Software
ICSM '97 Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Maintenance
International Journal of Human-Computer Studies - Notification user interfaces
Evaluation and analysis of users' activity organization
CHI '83 Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
A diary study of task switching and interruptions
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
If not now, when?: the effects of interruption at different moments within task execution
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
What a to-do: studies of task management towards the design of a personal task list manager
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Making sense of low-level usage data to understand user activities
SAICSIT '04 Proceedings of the 2004 annual research conference of the South African institute of computer scientists and information technologists on IT research in developing countries
No task left behind?: examining the nature of fragmented work
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Examining task engagement in sensor-based statistical models of human interruptibility
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
CHI '05 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Modelling the Information-Seeking Behaviour of Programmers - An Empirical Approach
IWPC '05 Proceedings of the 13th International Workshop on Program Comprehension
Proceedings of the 27th international conference on Software engineering
Studying Software Engineers: Data Collection Techniques for Software Field Studies
Empirical Software Engineering
NavTracks: Supporting Navigation in Software Maintenance
ICSM '05 Proceedings of the 21st IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance
Maintaining mental models: a study of developer work habits
Proceedings of the 28th international conference on Software engineering
Building Usage Contexts During Program Comprehension
ICPC '06 Proceedings of the 14th IEEE International Conference on Program Comprehension
How Are Java Software Developers Using the Eclipse IDE?
IEEE Software
Relo: Helping Users Manage Context during Interactive Exploratory Visualization of Large Codebases
VLHCC '06 Proceedings of the Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing
Code Thumbnails: Using Spatial Memory to Navigate Source Code
VLHCC '06 Proceedings of the Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing
An Industrial Case Study of Program Artifacts Viewed During Maintenance Tasks
WCRE '06 Proceedings of the 13th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering
Using task context to improve programmer productivity
Proceedings of the 14th ACM SIGSOFT international symposium on Foundations of software engineering
Let's go to the whiteboard: how and why software developers use drawings
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Understanding memory triggers for task tracking
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Information Needs in Collocated Software Development Teams
ICSE '07 Proceedings of the 29th international conference on Software Engineering
Characterizing and Understanding Development Sessions
ICPC '07 Proceedings of the 15th IEEE International Conference on Program Comprehension
Comparing episodic and semantic interfaces for task boundary identification
CASCON '07 Proceedings of the 2007 conference of the center for advanced studies on Collaborative research
Proceedings of the 30th international conference on Software engineering
Designing a prosthetic memory to support software developers
Companion of the 30th international conference on Software engineering
Human-Computer Interaction
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Evaluating cues for resuming interrupted programming tasks
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
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Interrupted and blocked tasks are a daily reality for professional programmers. Unfortunately, the strategies programmers use to recover lost knowledge and rebuild context when resuming work have not yet been well studied. In this paper, we describe an exploratory analysis performed on 10,000 recorded sessions of 86 programmers and a survey of 414 programmers to understand the various strategies and coping mechanisms developers use to manage interrupted programming tasks. Based on the analysis, we propose a framework for understanding these strategies and suggest how task resumption might be better supported in future development tools. The results suggest that task resumption is a frequent and persistent problem for developers. For example, we find that only 10% of the sessions have programming activity resume in less than 1 min after an interruption, only 7% of the programming sessions involve no navigation to other locations prior to editing. We also found that programmers use multiple coping mechanisms to recover task context when resuming work.