Hello everybody,
until May 2024 I wrote my Bachelor's Thesis titled "Dynamic Visual Cues for Code Comprehension and Navigation" under the supervision of Adrian Wagner.
The abstract of my thesis:
More than half of a developer’s time is spent on code comprehension and navigation. This is due to existing tools not sufficiently supporting developers. Various promising approaches exist to mitigate this issue. However, we identified a gap in the research for a dynamic approach supporting developers on a local level.
This bachelor’s thesis presents our idea for an approach to fill this gap, as well as an accompanying prototype. It provides developers with local context. To do so, it traces code dependencies and marks them within the IDE. Thus we hope to enable developers’ exploration of the code within methods. This is so far lacking from other approaches. We conducted two evaluations of our approach. First, a technical evaluation was conducted on the prototype. It shows how well the prototype performs on real-world code, including its limitations. Second, we present a user study. The results answer some open questions that arose. These questions concern the topic of what even constitutes a useful local context for developers. Based on the evaluation results, we conclude our approach has merit. However, we also identify various issues that need to be solved to make the approach viable.
Publications
- Christopher Helios. Dynamic Visual Cues for Code Comprehension and Navigation. Bachelor's Thesis, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, May 2024.
