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FSE 2012

Improving software developers' fluency by recommending development environment commands

Emerson R. Murphy-Hill, Rahul Jiresal, Gail C. Murphy

PDFDOI 10.1145/2393596.2393645dblp

Abstract

Software developers interact with the development environments they use by issuing commands that execute various programming tools, from source code formatters to build tools. However, developers often only use a small subset of the commands offered by modern development environments, reducing their overall development fluency. In this paper, we use several existing command recommender algorithms to suggest new commands to developers based on their existing command usage history, and also introduce several new algorithms. By running these algorithms on data submitted by several thousand Eclipse users, we describe two studies that explore the feasibility of automatically recommending commands to software developers. The results suggest that, while recommendation is more difficult in development environments than in other domains, it is still feasible to automatically recommend commands to developers based on their usage history, and that using patterns of past discovery is a useful way to do so.

BibTeX
@inproceedings{MurphyHill-al:FSE12,
  author    = {Emerson R. Murphy{-}Hill and
               Rahul Jiresal and
               Gail C. Murphy},
  title     = {Improving software developers' fluency by recommending development environment commands},
  booktitle = {FSE},
  pages     = {42},
  publisher = {{ACM}},
  year      = {2012},
}

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