A Practical Guide to Analyzing IDE Usage Data

by Will Snipes, Emerson Murphy-Hill, Thomas Fritz, Mohsen Vakilian, Kosta Damevski, Anil Nair, and David Shepherd.

In The Art and Science of Analyzing Software Data, 2015.

Pre-print at NCSU, Book at Elsevier, Book at Amazon, Book at Google.

Abstract

Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) such as Eclipse and Visual Studio provide tools and capabilities to perform tasks such as navigating among classes and methods, continuous compilation, code refactoring, automated testing, and integrated debugging all designed to increase productivity. Instrumenting the IDE to collect usage data provides a more fine-grained understanding on developers’ work than previously possible. Usage data supports analysis of how developers spend their time, what activities might benefit from greater tool support, where developers have difficulty comprehending code, and whether they are following specific practices such as test-driven development. With usage data, we expect to uncover more nuggets of how developers create mental models, how they investigate code, how they perform mini trial-and-error experiments, and what might drive productivity improvements for everyone.

BibTeX

@incollection{SnipesETAL2015IDEUsage,
  author = {Will Snipes and Emerson Murphy-Hill and Thomas Fritz and Mohsen Vakilian and Kosta Damevski and Anil Nair and David Shepherd},
  booktitle = {The Art and Science of Analyzing Software Data},
  title = {A Practical Guide to Analyzing IDE Usage Data},
  publisher = {Morgan Kaufmann},
  year = {2015}
}