Theory adapters as discipline coordinators
Proceedings of the 2004 ACM workshop on Interdisciplinary software engineering research
SoftVis '05 Proceedings of the 2005 ACM symposium on Software visualization
Studying Software Engineers: Data Collection Techniques for Software Field Studies
Empirical Software Engineering
A framework for describing and understanding mining tools in software development
MSR '05 Proceedings of the 2005 international workshop on Mining software repositories
On generating cognitive patterns of software comprehension
CASCON '05 Proceedings of the 2005 conference of the Centre for Advanced Studies on Collaborative research
Towards evidence-supported, question-directed collaborative program comprehension
CASCON '06 Proceedings of the 2006 conference of the Center for Advanced Studies on Collaborative research
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A key desideratum for many software comprehension tools is to reduce the mental burdens of software engineers. That is, the tools should support cognition. This key benefit is difficult to directly observe and measure, so evaluating such tools has been problematic. This paper describes an investigation into the application of distributed cognition theories to analyzing and observing cognitive support. Theories of cognitive support are used to generate an analysis of potential cognitive benefits provided by the compilation-error tracking facilities of a commercial software development environment. This analysis is used to generate a scheme for coding user observations such that cognitive support related activity can be tracked. Experiences in applying the technique on data from a field study are reported. The study also serves to provide a glimpse into the ways that programmers and tools cooperate. Implications are drawn for future practices of tool evaluation and engineering.