Explicit programming strategies

Software developers solve a diverse and wide range of problems. While software engineering research often focuses on tools to support this problem solving, the strategies that developers use to solve problems are at least as important. In this paper, we offer a novel approach for enabling developers...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inEmpirical software engineering : an international journal Vol. 25; no. 4; pp. 2416 - 2449
Main Authors LaToza, Thomas D., Arab, Maryam, Loksa, Dastyni, Ko, Amy J.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published New York Springer US 01.07.2020
Springer Nature B.V
Subjects
Compilers
Computer Science
Corporate profiles
Debugging
Engineering research
Human performance
Interpreters
Problem solving
Programming
Programming Languages
Software development
Software engineering
Software Engineering/Programming and Operating Systems
Productivity
Test-driven development
Developers
Strategies
Debugging
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Summary:Software developers solve a diverse and wide range of problems. While software engineering research often focuses on tools to support this problem solving, the strategies that developers use to solve problems are at least as important. In this paper, we offer a novel approach for enabling developers to follow explicit programming strategies that describe how an expert tackles a common programming problem. We define explicit programming strategies, grounding our definition in prior work both within software engineering and in other professions which have adopted more explicit procedures for problem solving. We then present a novel notation called Roboto and a novel strategy tracker tool that explicitly represent programming strategies and frame executing strategies as a collaborative effort between human abilities to make decisions and computer abilities to structure process and persist information. In a formative evaluation, 28 software developers of varying expertise completed a design task and a debugging task. We found that, compared to developers who are free to choose their own strategies, developers given explicit strategies experienced their work as more organized, systematic, and predictable, but also more constrained. Developers using explicit strategies were objectively more successful at the design and debugging tasks. We discuss the implications of Roboto and these findings, envisioning a thriving ecosystem of explicit strategies that accelerate and improve developers’ programming problem solving.
ISSN:1382-3256
1573-7616
DOI:10.1007/s10664-020-09810-1