Developers ask reachability questions

A reachability question is a search across feasible paths through a program for target statements matching search criteria. In three separate studies, we found that reachability questions are common and often time consuming to answer. In the first study, we observed 13 developers in the lab and found that half of the bugs developers inserted were associated with reachability questions. In the second study, 460 professional software developers reported asking questions that may be answered using reachability questions more than 9 times a day, and 82% rated one or more as at least somewhat hard to answer. In the third study, we observed 17 developers in the field and found that 9 of the 10 longest activities were associated with reachability questions. These findings suggest that answering reachability questions is an important source of difficulty understanding large, complex codebases.

[1]  James D. Herbsleb,et al.  Program comprehension as fact finding , 2007, ESEC-FSE '07.

[2]  Françoise Détienne,et al.  Software Design — Cognitive Aspects , 2001, Practitioner Series.

[3]  Frank Tip,et al.  A survey of program slicing techniques , 1994, J. Program. Lang..

[4]  N. Pennington.  Stimulus structures and mental representations in expert comprehension of computer programs , 1987, Cognitive Psychology.

[5]  David W. Binkley,et al.  Program slicing , 2008, 2008 Frontiers of Software Maintenance.

[6]  Rachel K. E. Bellamy,et al.  Using information scent to model the dynamic foraging behavior of programmers in maintenance tasks , 2008, CHI.

[7]  Janice Singer,et al.  An examination of software engineering work practices , 1997, CASCON.

[8]  Robert DeLine,et al.  Information Needs in Collocated Software Development Teams , 2007, 29th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE'07).

[9]  Daniel M. Germán,et al.  A survey and evaluation of tool features for understanding reverse-engineered sequence diagrams , 2008, J. Softw. Maintenance Res. Pract..

[10]  Amy J. Ko,et al.  Eliciting design requirements for maintenance-oriented IDEs: a detailed study of corrective and perfective maintenance tasks , 2005, Proceedings. 27th International Conference on Software Engineering, 2005. ICSE 2005..

[11]  Mark Weiser,et al.  Programmers use slices when debugging , 1982, CACM.

[12]  Emily Hill,et al.  Exploring the neighborhood with dora to expedite software maintenance , 2007, ASE '07.

[13]  Thomas D. LaToza,et al.  Maintaining mental models: a study of developer work habits , 2006, ICSE.

[14]  Brad A. Myers,et al.  An Exploratory Study of How Developers Seek, Relate, and Collect Relevant Information during Software Maintenance Tasks , 2006, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.

[15]  Lionel C. Briand,et al.  A Realistic Empirical Evaluation of the Costs and Benefits of UML in Software Maintenance , 2008, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.

[16]  Thomas Fritz,et al.  Does a programmer's activity indicate knowledge of code? , 2007, ESEC-FSE '07.

[17]  Mark Harman,et al.  An overview of program slicing , 2001, Softw. Focus.

[18]  Gail C. Murphy,et al.  Asking and Answering Questions during a Programming Change Task , 2008, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.

[19]  Manu Sridharan,et al.  Thin slicing , 2007, PLDI '07.

[20]  Jonathan Edwards,et al.  Coherent reaction , 2009, OOPSLA Companion.

[21]  Robert DeLine,et al.  Building an Ecologically valid, Large-scale Diagram to Help Developers Stay Oriented in Their Code , 2007, IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC 2007).