Task-First or Context-First? Tool Integration Revisited

If software engineering tools are not "properly integrated", they can reduce engineers' productivity. Associating and retrieving information scattered across the tools become unsystematic and inefficient. Our work provides empirical evidence on what is a "poor" and a "proper" tool integration, focusing on practitioners' perspectives. We interviewed 62 engineers and analyzed the content of their project artifacts. We identified problem situations and practices related to tool integration. Engineers agreed that tool integration approaches must support change, heterogeneity and automatic linking of change to context. To quantify our results, we conducted a field experiment with 27 and a survey with 782 subjects. We found a strong correlation between change frequency and preferred integration approaches. Particularly in projects with short release cycles, tasks should be used to link information handled by different tools. We also found that half of engineers' work is not defined as tasks. Therefore, a context-based tool integration approach is more effective than a task-based one.