Facilitating Information Management in Integrated Development Environments through Visual Interface Enhancements

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.