Cognitive walkthrough + personae = an empirical infrastructure for modeling software developers

This is the third in a series of reports about usability and learnability problems of integrated development environments (IDE). The first report used the method of ethnographic interviews, and the second report the methods of heuristic and psychometric evaluation to study problems that developers face in using IDEs. The present study extends previous work by applying the method of direct behavioral observation of more versus less experienced users of the same IDE for C++. We demonstrate in this paper how one can effectively use cognitive walkthroughs and code walkthroughs for empirically modeling developers' characteristics and personae.

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