I know what you did last summer
an investigation of how developers spend their time
Additional information
Authors
Type
Article in conference proceedings
Year
2015
Language
English
Abstract
Developing software is a complex mental activity, requiring extensive technical knowledge and abstraction capabilities. The tangible part of development is the use of tools to read, inspect, edit, and manipulate source code, usually through an IDE (integrated development environment). Common claims about software development include that program comprehension takes up half of the time of a developer, or that certain UI (user interface) paradigms of IDEs offer insufficient support to developers. Such claims are often based on anecdotal evidence, throwing up the question of whether they can be corroborated on more solid grounds. We present an in-depth analysis of how developers spend their time, based on a fine-grained IDE interaction dataset consisting of ca. 740 development sessions by 18 developers, amounting to 200 hours of development time and 5 million of IDE events. We propose an inference model of development activities to precisely measure the time spent in editing, navigating and searching for artifacts, interacting with the UI of the IDE, and performing corollary activities, such as inspection and debugging. We report several interesting findings which in part confirm and reinforce some common claims, but also disconfirm other beliefs about software development.
Keywords
Interaction data, IDE, Integrated Development Environment, Software Evolution, Program comprehension, Program understanding
Conference proceedings
IEEE 23rd International Conference on Program Comprehension ICPC : proceedings
Pages (or article number)
25–35
Diffusion
License
License undefined
Visibility
Public
Status open access
Green
