Susan Elliott Sim, Charles L. A. Clarke, and Richard C. Holt. Archetypal source code searches: A survey of software developers and maintainers. In Proceedings of the International Workshop on Program Comprehension, pages 180--187, Los Alamitos, California, 1998. IEEE Computer Society Press.  Home/Search   Document Details and Download   Summary   Related Articles   Check

....WSL, Wide Spectrum Language, Program Transformation, Legacy Systems, Restructuring. 1 Introduction Recent research into the activities of software engineers [10] has shown the need for tools capable of both semantic based searching and browsing through hierarchical structures. Other studies [3,6,9] provide strong evidence that software engineers desire tools to help them explore software. They use such tools heavily already and want improvements (the main search tools currently in use are text editors and regular expression search utilities such as grep) Top down program comprehension ....

....and frequently switch between them. The four most common search targets are: function de nitions, all uses of a function, variable de nitions, and all uses of a variable. The most common search motivations are: defect repair, code reuse, program understanding, feature addition, and impact analysis [9]. In [8] a design browser tool is described, for exible browsing of a system s design level representation and for information exchange with a suite of program comprehension tools, complemented with a retriever supporting full text and structural searching. Source code is parsed to an ....

S. E. Sim, C. L. A. Clarke & R. C. Holt, \Archetypal Source Code Searches: A Survey of Software Developers and Maintainers," International Workshop on Program Comprehension (1998).

....Diagram (CSD) an algorithmic level graphical representation of the software. The CSD was compared to four other graphical diagrams [25] Sim et al. conducted a survey using a web based questionnaire to find archetypes (i.e. typical or standard examples) of source code searching by maintainers [71]. Their results found that the most commonly used tools for searching were (by increasing usage) editors, grep, find, and integrated development environments. Administering the questionnaire over the Web was found to be very effective for information gathering. Summary This section reviewed ....

S. Sim, C. Clarke, and R. Holt. Archetypal source code searches: A survey of software developers and maintainers. In Proceedings of the 5th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering (WCRE-98), Honolulu, Hawaii, USA, pages 180--187, October 1998.

....is not necessarily an objective measure and so this survey was followed by more formal experiments [63] CHAPTER 3. TOOL INVESTIGATIONS 33 Sim at al. conducted a survey using a web based questionnaire to find archetypes (i.e. typical or standard examples) of source code searching by maintainers [142]. They were interested in studying three questions: 1. Which tools do programmers use to search code 2. What do they look for when searching code 3. Which tasks motivate a search They had 69 respondents to their survey which they posted to seven newsgroups. The most commonly used tools for ....

....signatures to reuse code. ffl Searching for an output string or usages of a variable to track down a bug. Administering the web based questionnaire over the web was found to be very effective as the information gathered from their survey could be used for designing improved searching tools [142]. 3.6 Summary This chapter reviewed various experimental techniques for evaluating and comparing software exploration tools. Each of the investigative techniques just described has advantages and disadvantages. However, combining these techniques (as Singer and Lethbridge have done [143] should ....

S.E. Sim, C.L.A. Clarke, and R.C. Holt. Archetypal source code searches: A survey of software developers and maintainers. In Proceedings of the 5th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering (WCRE'98), Hawaii, U.S.A., pages 180--187, October 1998.

....about the use of the tool. Companies and individuals were more likely to use CASE tools when adoption was voluntary, the tool was perceived to be superior to its predecessor(s) and there was management support. Sim et al. used a web based questionnaire to study source code searching behaviors [26]. We solicited respondents from seven USENET newsgroups from the comp. hierarchy to complete a questionnaire at a given web address. The questionnaire used a two page format. The first page informed the participants of the goals of the study and their rights and the second page displayed the ....

....the subsequent design decisions depend on them. The goals should describe the phenomenon being studied and the purpose of the study, i.e. how will the results be used. Field studies in software engineering have had a variety of goals. Some of them try to develop tool requirements by studying SEs [26][28] 31] Others want to make the management of software maintenance easier by characterizing maintenance activities [11] 13] Other studies attempt to understand existing development and maintenance processes, so they can prescribe new ones [18] 23] 27] 36] The goals of the research drive the ....

S.E. Sim, C.L.A. Clarke, and R.C. Holt. "Archetypal Source Code Searches: A Survey of Software Developers and Maintainers", International Workshop on Program Comprehension (IWPC'98), pages 180-187, Ischia, Italy.

....software developers and maintainers as they searched software architectures, we studied how they search source code. We conducted a survey using a questionnaire on a web page to collect information on the tools used to search, the strengths and weaknesses of these tools, and anecdotes of searches [28]. The results of the survey most germane to this discussion are the search targets and the tools used for searching. The most common search targets were: function definitions (or bodies) all uses of a function, all uses of a variable, and variable definitions. These search targets were identified ....

S. E. Sim, C. L. A. Clarke, and R. C. Holt, "Archetypal Source Code Searches: A Survey of Software Developers and Maintainers," presented at 6th International Workshop on Program Comprehension, Ischia, Italy, 1998.

No context found.

Susan Elliott Sim, Charles L. A. Clarke, and Richard C. Holt. Archetypal source code searches: A survey of software developers and maintainers. In Proceedings of the International Workshop on Program Comprehension, pages 180--187, Los Alamitos, California, 1998. IEEE Computer Society Press.

Online articles have much greater impact   More about CiteSeer.IST   Add search form to your site   Submit documents   Feedback  

CiteSeer.IST - Copyright Penn State and NEC