Code Thumbnails: Using Spatial Memory to Navigate Source Code

Authors:
Robert DeLine;Mary Czerwinski;Brian Meyers;Gina Venolia;Steven Drucker;George Robertson
Affiliations:
Microsoft Research, Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, USA;Microsoft Research, Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, USA;Microsoft Research, Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, USA;Microsoft Research, Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, USA;Microsoft Research, Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, USA;Microsoft Research, Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, USA
Venue:
VLHCC '06 Proceedings of the Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing
Year:
2006

Citing 0
Cited 19

FASTDash: a visual dashboard for fostering awareness in software teams

Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Promoting developer-specific awareness

Proceedings of the 2008 international workshop on Cooperative and human aspects of software engineering
Towards a framework for software navigation techniques

Proceedings of the 2008 international workshop on Cooperative and human aspects of software engineering
Listening to programmers Taxonomies and characteristics of comments in operating system code

ICSE '09 Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Software Engineering
Silhouette: visual language for meaningful shape

Proceedings of the 24th ACM SIGPLAN conference companion on Object oriented programming systems languages and applications
Evaluating cues for resuming interrupted programming tasks

Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Code bubbles: a working set-based interface for code understanding and maintenance

Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Interaction and visualization techniques for programming

INTERACT'07 Proceedings of the 11th IFIP TC 13 international conference on Human-computer interaction - Volume Part II
Software Cartography: thematic software visualization with consistent layout

Journal of Software Maintenance and Evolution: Research and Practice - Working Conference on Reverse Engineering (WCRE 2008)
Software development with code maps

Communications of the ACM
Immediate search in the IDE as an example of socio-technical congruence in search-driven development

Proceedings of 2010 ICSE Workshop on Search-driven Development: Users, Infrastructure, Tools and Evaluation
Code canvas: zooming towards better development environments

Proceedings of the 32nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering - Volume 2
Software Development with Code Maps

Queue - Visualization
CodePad: interactive spaces for maintaining concentration in programming environments

Proceedings of the 5th international symposium on Software visualization
Embedding spatial software visualization in the IDE: an exploratory study

Proceedings of the 5th international symposium on Software visualization
Resumption strategies for interrupted programming tasks

Software Quality Control
Digitally annexing desk space for software development (NIER track)

Proceedings of the 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering
Stacksplorer: call graph navigation helps increasing code maintenance efficiency

Proceedings of the 24th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology
Situational awareness: personalizing issue tracking systems

Proceedings of the 2013 International Conference on Software Engineering

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.02

Visualization

Abstract

Modern development environments provide many features for navigating source code, yet recent studies show the developers still spend a tremendous amount of time just navigating. Since existing navigation features rely heavily on memorizing symbol names, we present a new design, called Code Thumbnails, intended to allow a developer to navigate source code by forming a spatial memory of it. To aid intra-file navigation, we add a thumbnail image of the file to the scrollbar, which makes any part of the file one click away. To aid interfile navigation, we provide a desktop of file thumbnail images, which make any part of any file one click away. We did a formative evaluation of the design with eleven experienced developers and present the results.