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Software Quality Journal

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01.03.2011

Resumption strategies for interrupted programming tasks

verfasst von: Chris Parnin, Spencer Rugaber

Erschienen in: Software Quality Journal | Ausgabe 1/2011

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Abstract

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.

Vorheriger Artikel Guest editor’s introduction to the special section on the 2009 international conference on program comprehension (ICPC 2009)

Nächster Artikel Automatically identifying changes that impact code-to-design traceability during evolution

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Titel: Resumption strategies for interrupted programming tasks
verfasst von: Chris Parnin
Spencer Rugaber
Publikationsdatum: 01.03.2011
Verlag: Springer US
Erschienen in: Software Quality Journal / Ausgabe 1/2011
Print ISSN: 0963-9314
Elektronische ISSN: 1573-1367
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11219-010-9104-9

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