Identifying developers’ habits and expectations in copy and paste programming practice

Máster Universitario en Investigación e Innovación en Inteligencia Computacional y Sistemas InteractivosBoth novice and experienced developers rely more and more in external sources of code to include into their programs by copy and paste code snippets. This behavior differs from the traditional software design approach where cohesion was achieved via a conscious design effort. Due to this fact, it is essential to know how copy and paste programming practices are actually carried out, so that IDEs (Integrated Development Environments) and code recommenders can be designed to fit with developer expectations and habit

Swarm Debugging: the Collective Intelligence on Interactive Debugging

One of the most important tasks in software maintenance is debugging. To start an interactive debugging session, developers usually set breakpoints in an integrated development environment and navigate through different paths in their debuggers. We started our work by asking what debugging information is useful to share among developers and study two pieces of information: breakpoints (and their locations) and sessions (debugging paths). To answer our question, we introduce the Swarm Debugging concept to frame the sharing of debugging information, the Swarm Debugging Infrastructure (SDI) with which practitioners and researchers can collect and share data about developers’ interactive debugging sessions, and the Swarm Debugging Global View (GV) to display debugging paths. Using the SDI, we conducted a large study with professional developers to understand how developers set breakpoints. Using the GV, we also analyzed professional developers in two studies and collected data about their debugging sessions. Our observations and the answers to our research questions suggest that sharing and visualizing debugging data can support debugging activities

Swarm Debugging: the Collective Intelligence on Interactive Debugging

One of the most important tasks in software maintenance is debugging. To start an interactive debugging session, developers usually set breakpoints in an integrated development environment and navigate through different paths in their debuggers. We started our work by asking what debugging information is useful to share among developers and study two pieces of information: breakpoints (and their locations) and sessions (debugging paths). To answer our question, we introduce the Swarm Debugging concept to frame the sharing of debugging information, the Swarm Debugging Infrastructure (SDI) with which practitioners and researchers can collect and share data about developers’ interactive debugging sessions, and the Swarm Debugging Global View (GV) to display debugging paths. Using the SDI, we conducted a large study with professional developers to understand how developers set breakpoints. Using the GV, we also analyzed professional developers in two studies and collected data about their debugging sessions. Our observations and the answers to our research questions suggest that sharing and visualizing debugging data can support debugging activities

An Empirical Study of the Copy and Paste Behavior during Development

ever, little is known about the copy and paste behavior during development. To better understand the copy and paste behavior, automated approaches are proposed to identify cloned code. However, such automated approaches can only identify the location of the code that has been copied and pasted, but little is known about the context of the copy and paste. On the other hand, prior research studying actual copy and paste behavior is based on a small number of users in an experimental setup. In this paper, we study the behavior of developers copying and pasting code while using the Eclipse IDE. We mine the usage data of over 20,000 Eclipse users. We aim to explore the different patterns of Copy and Paste (C&P) that are used by Eclipse users during development. We compare such usage patterns to the regular users ’ usage of copy and paste during non-development tasks reported in earlier studies. Our findings instruct builders of future IDEs. We find that developers ’ C&P behavior is considerably different from the behavior of regular users. For example, developers tend to perform more frequent C&P in the same file contrary to regular users, who tend to perform C&P across different windows. Moreover, we find that C&P across different programming languages is a common behavior as we extracted more than 75,000 C&P incidents across different programming languages. Such a finding highlights the need for clone detection techniques that can detect code clones across different programming languages. I