Mining Sequences of Developer Interactions in Visual Studio for Usage Smells

In this paper, we present a semi-automatic approach for mining a large-scale dataset of IDE interactions to extract usage smells, i.e., inefficient IDE usage patterns exhibited by developers in the field. The approach outlined in this paper first mines frequent IDE usage patterns, filtered via a set of thresholds and by the authors, that are subsequently supported (or disputed) using a developer survey, in order to form usage smells. In contrast with conventional mining of IDE usage data, our approach identifies time-ordered sequences of developer actions that are exhibited by many developers in the field. This pattern mining workflow is resilient to the ample noise present in IDE datasets due to the mix of actions and events that these datasets typically contain. We identify usage patterns and smells that contribute to the understanding of the usability of Visual Studio for debugging, code search, and active file navigation, and, more broadly, to the understanding of developer behavior during these software development activities. Among our findings is the discovery that developers are reluctant to use conditional breakpoints when debugging, due to perceived IDE performance problems as well as due to the lack of error checking in specifying the conditional

IDE Interaction Support With Command Recommender Systems

Software developers' knowledge of integrated development environment (IDE) directly impacts on their productivity. IDE command recommender systems aim at identifying and convincingly presenting to software developers functionality that can help them to accomplish their daily tasks, without overloading them with well known or useless information. Command recommendation requires the estimation of both the utility of commands and the acceptance of the user for new command recommendations. In this paper, we focus on how and when such recommendations should be presented. We performed a long-term user study and our results show that IDE command recommendation must be presented with adequate descriptions of the commands and good usage examples. It seems that a higher frequency of recommendation notifications could be useful, but it should not be too intrusive, especially while developers are focusing on more demanding tasks. To improve recommendation acceptance rate, researchers should also focus on context-aware algorithms and tailor command recommendation timing

Model-Based Systems Engineering Pilot Program at NASA Langley

NASA Langley Research Center conducted a pilot program to evaluate the benefits of using a Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) approach during the early phase of the Materials International Space Station Experiment-X (MISSE-X) project. The goal of the pilot was to leverage MBSE tools and methods, including the Systems Modeling Language (SysML), to understand the net gain of utilizing this approach on a moderate size flight project. The System Requirements Review (SRR) success criteria were used to guide the work products desired from the pilot. This paper discusses the pilot project implementation, provides SysML model examples, identifies lessons learned, and describes plans for further use on MBSE on MISSE-X

Chatbots for Modelling, Modelling of Chatbots

Tesis Doctoral inédita leída en la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Escuela Politécnica Superior, Departamento de Ingeniería Informática. Fecha de Lectura: 28-03-202

Practical domain-specific debuggers using the Moldable Debugger framework

International audienceUnderstanding the run-time behavior of software systems can be a challenging activity. Debuggers are an essential category of tools used for this purpose as they give developers direct access to the running systems. Nevertheless, traditional debuggers rely on generic mechanisms to introspect and interact with the running systems, while developers reason about and formulate domain-specific questions using concepts and abstractions from their application domains. This mismatch creates an abstraction gap between the debugging needs and the debugging support leading to an inefficient and error-prone debugging effort, as developers need to recover concrete domain concepts using generic mechanisms. To reduce this gap, and increase the efficiency of the debugging process, we propose a framework for developing domain-specific debuggers, called the Moldable Debugger, that enables debugging at the level of the application domain. The Moldable Debugger is adapted to a domain by creating and combining domain-specific debugging operations with domain-specific debugging views, and adapts itself to a domain by selecting, at run time, appropriate debugging operations and views. To ensure the proposed model has practical applicability (i.e., can be used in practice to build real debuggers), we discuss, from both a performance and usability point of view, three implementation strategies. We further motivate the need for domain-specific debugging, identify a set of key requirements and show how our approach improves debugging by adapting the debugger to several domains

I See Myself in that Career : Exploring Methods to Attract the Next Generation Transportation Workforce

Predicting a workforce crisis for the past twenty years, the transportation field has launched a wide variety of initiatives to increase the future talent pipeline that would choose transportation as a field of choice for study and future careers. This project follows on the premise that increasing awareness of career opportunities is essential to attracting new entrants at an early age, and that awareness building should be dynamic. This includes providing views of who works in the transportation field, what their experiences are, and what they value about their work. This paper hypothesizes that first-person glimpses into transportation careers are just as essential for job seekers as knowing job specs, qualifications, pay scales and opportunities for advancement. In-depth career profiles of workers were developed and showcase individuals, from diverse backgrounds and interests, engaged in work critical to the future of our transportation systems and infrastructure as an inducement to consider future education and training work needed to enter such a field. A number of other initiatives have created occupation and career profiles in public and private agencies. As with other awareness building and talent pipeline development initiatives such efforts need to be made accessible to a wider more diverse audience and metrics for tracking their effectiveness should be developed and implemented. Coordinating and testing these efforts are part of a future stage of program

Optimisation of CERN tools & methods for e-learning: the case of short online tutorials

The term “e-learning” is directly related to the practice of distance education, which started about one hundred and fifty years ago. At this time, it was possible for lecturers to teach using means such as mail, phone, radio or television. With the progress made in the field of telecommunications, the Internet and the web allowed people to drastically extend their ability to learn through various means, avoiding the constraints of location and time. It is often difficult to know exactly what is covered by the word “e-learning”. The concepts of MOOC or blended learning are very popular nowadays, whereas fewer people know precisely what rapid e-learning is. This particular type of distance education is often used for quickly teaching procedures to people, using, for example, short online video tutorials. This form of education will be the one focused on for this thesis. We collaborated for six months with the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), to provide an analysis and recommendations regarding the creation of short online video tutorials. Our primary aims were: assessing the technologies already available on the web, i.e. free, open-source and cross-platform screen recording tools. Also providing recommendations concerning the best practices and pedagogical recommendations to take into consideration for the creation of content. Taking user-related variables into account can ensure the success of an e-learning project, despite the technological features which seem, often, more important to people than the pedagogical principles. To achieve these goals, we gathered all necessary information to define which tools and content would be the most appropriate for our project. We assessed eight potentially relevant screen recording packages and compared them according to a selection of criteria. We also found that dealing with open-source and free packages was more demanding than with proprietary and profit-oriented ones. In this context, we concluded with recommendations for the use of three easy to use screen recording tools for the lecturers, depending on their preferred Operating System (OS). Also, a terminal recording tool for processes achieved in a shell. We also provided a set of pedagogical recommendations to create a good short online tutorial. We also discussed future work regarding rapid e-learning at CERN