Recording, Visualising and Understanding Developer Programming Behaviour

To understand how developers solve programming tasks, it is necessary to observe what they are doing, i.e., what specific actions they perform, which strategies they apply and how they make use of possibly present, but not yet known or otherwise not yet available information that is needed to solve a task. To do so, we implemented a plug-in for the Eclipse IDE which captures nearly every interaction with the IDE a developer performs when working on a programming task. This enables us to comprehensively track a developer’s behaviour, e.g., whether and when a code edit needed for solving a given task was performed, and even more interesting, what were the preceding steps that led the developer to do so. In a first experiment conducted with the new plug-in, we were able to observe action patterns and program comprehension stages that confirm results of previous studies as well as were partly only suspected until now by recent literature, but never truly observed before.Screencast of the tool: https://youtu.be/GeZI-vCdgfoClosed caption version: https://youtu.be/mgt6Q-t7U00