Speaker: Ohad Barzilay, Tel Aviv University
TITLE: Human and Social Aspects of Example Usage


ABSTRACT
As part of our research on the use of code examples in professional programming, we present two recent results: First, we focus on the developer's awareness and attentiveness to example usage. We identify three types of lack of attentiveness: lack of awareness that causes professional developers to use examples only in certain contexts but not in others, lack of attentiveness to examples of different scales, and lack of attentiveness to the variety of purposes examples may serve. We present a qualitative research followed by a focus group case study that illustrate our findings.

On the second part, I'll present a virtual focus group case study that examines .NET developers' perception regarding example usage. We divide the developers into groups by their position with respect to example usage and analyze their considerations. The results are surprising – first, only 35 percents of the participants reported habitual and comprehensive example usage. Second, despite of the engineering challenges involved with extensive example usage, we conclude that developers approach to example usage is dominated by human and social factors and not engineering ones.


Both studies were conducted with Professor Amiram Yehudai (Tel Aviv University) and Professor Orit Hazzan (Technion).