TY - GEN
T1 - Facilitating Information Management in Integrated Development Environments through Visual Interface Enhancements
AU - Cai, Haipeng
N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2015 IEEE.
PY - 2015/11/6
Y1 - 2015/11/6
N2 - In the past decades, integrated development environments (IDEs) have been largely advanced to facilitate software engineering tasks and improve developer productivity. Yet, with growing information needs driven by increasing complexity in developing modern software with demands for high quality and reliability, developers often need to switch among multiple user interfaces, even across different applications, in their development process, which breaks their mental workflow thus tends to adversely affect their work efficiency and productivity. This paper discusses challenges faced by the current IDE design mainly due to working context transitions imposed on developers during their search for multiple information sources for their development needs. It remarks the primary blockades behind and initially explores some high-level design considerations for overcoming such challenges in the next-generation IDEs. Specifically, a few design enhancements on top of modern IDEs are proposed, attempting to reduce the overheads of frequent context switching commonly seen in the multitasking practice of developers.
AB - In the past decades, integrated development environments (IDEs) have been largely advanced to facilitate software engineering tasks and improve developer productivity. Yet, with growing information needs driven by increasing complexity in developing modern software with demands for high quality and reliability, developers often need to switch among multiple user interfaces, even across different applications, in their development process, which breaks their mental workflow thus tends to adversely affect their work efficiency and productivity. This paper discusses challenges faced by the current IDE design mainly due to working context transitions imposed on developers during their search for multiple information sources for their development needs. It remarks the primary blockades behind and initially explores some high-level design considerations for overcoming such challenges in the next-generation IDEs. Specifically, a few design enhancements on top of modern IDEs are proposed, attempting to reduce the overheads of frequent context switching commonly seen in the multitasking practice of developers.
KW - Automatic recommendation
KW - Context switching
KW - Information need
KW - Integrated development environment
KW - Programming interface
KW - Software visualization
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/84963623256
U2 - 10.1109/QRS-C.2015.46
DO - 10.1109/QRS-C.2015.46
M3 - Conference contribution
T3 - Proceedings - 2015 IEEE International Conference on Software Quality, Reliability and Security-Companion, QRS-C 2015
SP - 221
EP - 229
BT - Proceedings - 2015 IEEE International Conference on Software Quality, Reliability and Security-Companion, QRS-C 2015
PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
T2 - IEEE International Conference on Software Quality, Reliability and Security-Companion, QRS-C 2015
Y2 - 3 August 2015 through 5 August 2015
ER -