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How Software Engineering Tools Organize Programmer Behavior During the Task of Data Encapsulation (1997)
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| Venue: | Empirical Software Engineering |
| Citations: | 3 - 0 self |
BibTeX
@ARTICLE{Bowdidge97howsoftware,
author = {Robert W. Bowdidge and William G. Griswold},
title = {How Software Engineering Tools Organize Programmer Behavior During the Task of Data Encapsulation},
journal = {Empirical Software Engineering},
year = {1997},
volume = {2},
pages = {221--267}
}
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Abstract
Tool-assisted meaning-preserving program restructuring has been proposed to aid the evolution of large software systems. These systems are difficult to modify because relevant information is often widely distributed. We performed an exploratory study to determine how programmers used a restructuring tool interface called the "star diagram" to organize their behavior for the task of encapsulating a data structure. We videotaped six pairs of programmers while they encapsulated and enhanced a data structure in an existing program. Each team used one of three environments: standard UNIX tools, a restructuring tool with textual view of the source code, or a restructuring tool using the star diagram view. We systematically analyzed the videotape transcripts to derive a model of how the programmers performed encapsulation. Each team opportunistically exploited the features of the tools (e.g., cursors) and the program representation (e.g., ordering of lines in a file) to help them track the current state of the activity...
Keyphrases
data encapsulation data structure star diagram large software system source code textual view restructuring tool current state star diagram view standard unix tool relevant information tool interface exploratory study tool-assisted meaning-preserving program restructuring program representation
