Probes and Sensors: The Design of Feedback Loops for Usability Improvements

The importance of user-centric design methods in the design of programming tools is now well accepted. These methods depend on creating a feedback loop between the designers and their users, providing data about developers, their needs and behaviour gathered through various means. These include controlled experiments, field observations, as well as analytical frameworks. However, whilst there have been a number of experiments detailed, quantitative data is rarely used as part of the design process. Part of the reason for this might be that such feedback loops are hard to design and use in practice. Still, we believe there is potential in this approach and opportunities in gathering this kind of ‘big data’. In this paper, we sketch a framework for reasoning about these feedback loops - when data gathering may make sense and for how to incorporate the results of such data gathering into the programming tool design process. We illustrate how to use the framework on two case studies and outline some of the challenges in instrumentation and in knowing when and how to act on signals

Fifty years of the Psychology of Programming

This paper reflects on the evolution (past, present and future) of the ‘psychology of programming' over the 50 year period of this anniversary issue. The International Journal of Human-Computer Studies (IJHCS) has been a key venue for much seminal work in this field, including its first foundations, and we review the changing research concerns seen in publications over these five decades. We relate this thematic evolution to research taking place over the same period within more specialist communities, especially the Psychology of Programming Interest Group (PPIG), the Empirical Studies of Programming series (ESP), and the ongoing community in Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC). Many other communities have interacted with psychology of programming, both influenced by research published within the specialist groups, and in turn influencing research priorities. We end with an overview of the core theories that have been developed over this period, as an introductory resource for new researchers, and also with the authors’ own analysis of key priorities for future research