research-article

Asking and Answering Questions during a Programming Change Task in Pharo Language

Authors:

Juraj Kubelka,

Alexandre Bergel,

Romain RobbesAuthors Info & Claims

PLATEAU '14: Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Evaluation and Usability of Programming Languages and Tools

Pages 1 - 11

https://doi.org/10.1145/2688204.2688212

Published: 21 October 2014 Publication History

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Abstract

Previous studies focus on the specific questions software engineers ask when evolving a codebase. Though these studies observe developers using statically typed languages, little is known about the developer questions using dynamically typed languages. Dynamically typed languages present new challenges to understanding and navigating in a codebase and could affect results reported by previous studies.

This paper replicates a previous study and presents the analysis of six programming sessions made in Pharo, a dynamically typed language. We found a similar result when comparing sessions on an unfamiliar codebase with the previous work. Our result on the familiar code greatly deviates from the replicated study, likely caused by different tasks and development strategies. Both missing type information and test driven development affected participant behavior and prudence on codebase understanding, where some participants made changes based on assumptions.

We provide a set of questions that are useful in characterizing activity related to the use of a dynamically typed language and test-driven development -- questions not explicitly considered in previous research. We also present a number of issues that we would like to discuss during the PLATEAU workshop.

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Willembrinck MCostiou SEtien ADucasse S(2021)Time-Traveling Debugging Queries: Faster Program Exploration2021 IEEE 21st International Conference on Software Quality, Reliability and Security (QRS)10.1109/QRS54544.2021.00074(642-653)Online publication date: Dec-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/QRS54544.2021.00074
Bouraffa AMaalej W(2020)Two Decades of Empirical Research on Developers' Information NeedsProceedings of the IEEE/ACM 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering Workshops10.1145/3387940.3391485(71-77)Online publication date: 27-Jun-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3387940.3391485
Kruger JHebig R(2020)What Developers (Care to) Recall: An Interview Survey on Smaller Systems2020 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME)10.1109/ICSME46990.2020.00015(46-57)Online publication date: Sep-2020
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSME46990.2020.00015
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Index Terms

Asking and Answering Questions during a Programming Change Task in Pharo Language
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. Development frameworks and environments
      1. Integrated and visual development environments

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Published In

PLATEAU '14: Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Evaluation and Usability of Programming Languages and Tools

October 2014

80 pages

ISBN:9781450322775

DOI:10.1145/2688204

Program Chairs:
Joshua Sunshine
Carnegie Mellon University, USA
,
Thomas LaToza
University of California, Irvine, USA
,
Craig Anslow
University of Calgary, Canada

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

In-Cooperation

SIGAda: ACM Special Interest Group on Ada Programming Language

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 21 October 2014

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Research-article

Funding Sources

Comisión Nacional de Investigación Científica y Tecnológica

Conference

SPLASH '14

Sponsor:

SIGPLAN

SPLASH '14: Conference on Systems, Programming, and Applications: Software for Humanity

October 21, 2014

Oregon, Portland, USA

Acceptance Rates

PLATEAU '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 5 of 8 submissions, 63%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 5 of 8 submissions, 63%

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Cited By

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Willembrinck MCostiou SEtien ADucasse S(2021)Time-Traveling Debugging Queries: Faster Program Exploration2021 IEEE 21st International Conference on Software Quality, Reliability and Security (QRS)10.1109/QRS54544.2021.00074(642-653)Online publication date: Dec-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/QRS54544.2021.00074
Bouraffa AMaalej W(2020)Two Decades of Empirical Research on Developers' Information NeedsProceedings of the IEEE/ACM 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering Workshops10.1145/3387940.3391485(71-77)Online publication date: 27-Jun-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3387940.3391485
Kruger JHebig R(2020)What Developers (Care to) Recall: An Interview Survey on Smaller Systems2020 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME)10.1109/ICSME46990.2020.00015(46-57)Online publication date: Sep-2020
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSME46990.2020.00015
Kubelka JRobbes RBergel AGuéhéneuc YKhomh FSarro F(2019)Live programming and software evolutionProceedings of the 27th International Conference on Program Comprehension10.1109/ICPC.2019.00017(30-41)Online publication date: 25-May-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ICPC.2019.00017
Kubelka JUchitel SOrso ARobillard M(2017)Artifact driven communication to improve program comprehensionProceedings of the 39th International Conference on Software Engineering Companion10.1109/ICSE-C.2017.47(457-460)Online publication date: 20-May-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ICSE-C.2017.47
Milojković NGhafari MNierstrasz OScanniello GLo DSerebrenik A(2017)Exploiting type hints in method argument names to improve lightweight type inferenceProceedings of the 25th International Conference on Program Comprehension10.1109/ICPC.2017.33(77-87)Online publication date: 20-May-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ICPC.2017.33
Milojković NGhafari MNierstrasz OScanniello GLo DSerebrenik A(2017)It's duck (typing) season!Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Program Comprehension10.1109/ICPC.2017.10(312-315)Online publication date: 20-May-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ICPC.2017.10
Spasojević BGhafari MNierstrasz OLaval JEtien A(2016)The Object RepositoryProceedings of the 11th edition of the International Workshop on Smalltalk Technologies10.1145/2991041.2991048(1-10)Online publication date: 23-Aug-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2991041.2991048
Milojković NNierstrasz OVisser EMurphy-Hill ELopes C(2016)Exploring cheap type inference heuristics in dynamically typed languagesProceedings of the 2016 ACM International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming and Software10.1145/2986012.2986017(43-56)Online publication date: 20-Oct-2016
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