How tools in IDEs shape developers' navigation behavior

  • Authors:

  • Jan-Peter Krämer;Thorsten Karrer;Joachim Kurz;Moritz Wittenhagen;Jan Borchers

  • Affiliations:

  • RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, NRW, Germany;RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, NRW, Germany;RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, NRW, Germany;RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, NRW, Germany;RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, NRW, Germany

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

Understanding source code is crucial for successful software maintenance, and navigating the call graph is especially helpful to understand source code [12]. We compared maintenance performance across four different development environments: an IDE without any call graph exploration tool, a Call Hierarchy tool as found in Eclipse, and the tools Stacksplorer [7]and Blaze [11]. Using any of the call graph exploration tools more developers could solve certain maintenance tasks correctly. Only Stacksplorer and Blaze, however, were also able to decrease task completion times, although the Call Hierarchy offers access to a larger part of the call graph. To investigate if this result was caused by a change in navigation behavior between the tools, we used a set of predictive models to create formally comparable descriptions of programmer navigation. The results suggest that the decrease in task completion times has been caused by Stacksplorer and Blaze promoting call graph navigation more than the Call Hierarchy tool.