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).