LorenzoBaracchi

Most development activities, like program under- standing, source code navigation and editing, are supported by Integrated Development Environments (IDEs). They provide different tools and user interfaces (UI) to interact with the source code, such as browsers, debuggers, and inspectors. It is uncertain how and when programmers use different UI elements of an IDE and to what extent they appropriately support development.

Previously we developed DFLOW, a tool that seamlessly records and processes interaction data. Our long-term goal is to assess to what extent the UIs of IDEs support the workflow of developers and whether they can be improved. As a first step we present our approach to analyze development sessions in the form of visual storytelling. We illustrate our initial catalogue of visualizations through two development stories.

@inproceedings{Mine2014a,
      Author = {Roberto Minelli and Lorenzo Baracchi and Andrea Mocci and Michele Lanza},
      Booktitle = {Proceedings of ICSME 2014 (30th International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution)},
      Title = {Visual Storytelling of Development Sessions},
      Pages = {to be published},
      Year = {2014}}
              

Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) have become the de facto standard vehicle to develop software systems. The user interface (UI) of an IDE offers a staggering amount of facilities to manipulate source code, such as inspectors, debuggers, recommenders, alternative viewers, etc. It is unclear how developers use the UI of an IDE and whether such UIs actually give appropriate support to the developers. We present a visual approach to understand and characterize development sessions from the UI perspective. The tool support- ing our approach mines and processes the finest-grained UI- level events making up development sessions and presents them visually. We have collected, visualized, and analyzed hundreds of development sessions and report on our findings.

  @inproceedings{Mine2014a,
        Author = {Roberto Minelli and Andrea Mocci and Michele Lanza and Lorenzo Baracchi},
        Booktitle = {Proceedings of VISSOFT 2014 (1st IEEE Working Conference on Software Visualization)},
        Publisher = {IEEE CS Press},
        Pages = {to be published},
        Title = {Visualizing Developer Interactions},
        Year = {2014}}
              

Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) are isolated from those communication means that programmers use daily to interact with each other—as if talk and work were unrelated in software development. We present REmail, an Eclipse plugin, that aims at filling this gap. REmail integrates email communication in the IDE, allowing developers to quickly and easily retrieve emails related to the class at hand, perform customized searches, or watch trends in discussions about code. REmail also allows developers to produce information, e.g.,by rating the value of any message or by sending contextual emails.

@article{bacchelliremail,
    title={REmail--Blending Talk and Work in Eclipse},
    author={Bacchelli, Alberto and Baracchi, Lorenzo and Lanza, Michele}
}
            

Software developers use Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) to cope with the complexity of editing, navigating and understanding software artifacts. IDEs integrate different tools like editors, debuggers, and version control system. Analyzing the interactions developers have with IDEs is a first step towards building better IDEs that enhance software development processes from the per- spective of the software developer himself. We built the tool HACKNEYED, that provides a set of visualizations about the behavior of software developers while using IDEs. HACKNEYED leverages develop- ment sessions recorded with DFLOW. Using them we can analyze the behavior of software developers. By means of these visualizations we discovered some insights on the habits and actions of software developers. For example we have evidence that developers spend considerably more time in understanding software artifacts than editing them.

@article{baracchi2014visual,
    title={Visualizing Developers Interactions with the IDE},
    author={Baracchi, Lorenzo},
    year={2014}
}
            

The development of a software system is a long and complicated process: Analyzing the evolution of a software system helps to reconstruct the story of a project , which can help to understand the software itself and how it was developed. Visualization can be a useful technique to depict this story by reducing the amount of information needed to under- stand software development processes. In this bachelor project we present two tools: Peaksight and Mr.Bubbly. We developed them with the goal to create effective visualizations of data from commits, emails, and bugs. Using these visualizations we are able to tell the story of how a software system evolved over time with the goal of using this knowledge to better understand the history and the evolution of the software. We created two different type of visualizations: one static in Peaksight and one animated in Mr.Bubbly. We create a story seen from different perspectives, which combined creates a more complete vision.

@article{baracchi2012visual,
    title={Visual storytelling of Software Systems},
    author={Baracchi, Lorenzo},
    year={2012}
}