SPLASH 2014
Mon 20 - Fri 24 October 2014 Portland, Oregon, United States
Tue 21 Oct 2014 10:30 - 10:52 at Salon D - Session 2 Chair(s): Craig Anslow

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.

Tue 21 Oct

Displayed time zone: Tijuana, Baja California change

10:30 - 12:00
Session 2PLATEAU at Salon D
Chair(s): Craig Anslow University of Calgary
10:30
22m
Talk
Asking and Answering Questions during a Programming Change Task in Pharo Language
PLATEAU
File Attached
10:52
22m
Talk
EUKLAS: Supporting Copy-and-Paste Strategies for Integrating Example Code
PLATEAU
Christian Doerner Senacor Technologies AG, Andrew Faulring Carnegie Mellon University , Brad A. Myers Carnegie Mellon University
File Attached
11:15
22m
Talk
Empirical Comparison of Visual to Hybrid Formula Manipulation in Educational Programming Languages for Teenagers
PLATEAU
Roxane Koitz-Hristov Graz University of Technology, Wolfgang Slany Institute of Software Technology, Graz University of Technology
File Attached
11:37
22m
Talk
Usability and Suitability Survey of Features in Visual IDEs for Non-Programmers
PLATEAU
Jean Michel Rouly George Mason University, Jonathan Orbeck University of Alabama, Eugene Syriani University of Montreal
File Attached