Hi Derek,
We have done a number of studies in my lab about APIs, and programmer's use of tools to help understand code and APIs. We focus on individual programmers, rather than groups and processes (unlike most other ESE work apparently). Here are some relevant publications about our studies (not including any studies of our own tools): Professional programmers: 1. Thomas D. LaToza and Brad Myers. "Developers Ask Reachability Questions", ICSE'2010: 32nd International Conference on Software Engineering, Cape Town, South Africa, 2-8 May 2010. pp. 185-194. pdf <http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tlatoza/icse10-tdl.pdf> 2. Thomas D. LaToza, David Garlan, James D. Herbsleb, Brad A. Myers, "Program comprehension as fact finding", ESEC/FSE 2007: ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, Dubrovnik, Croatia, September 3-7, 2007, pp. 361-370. pdf <http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tlatoza/fse07.pdf> 3. Thomas D. LaToza and Brad A. Myers, "Designing Useful Tools for Developers", PLATEAU 2011 <http://ecs.victoria.ac.nz/Events/PLATEAU> : Evaluation and Usability of Programming Languages and Tools, workshop at the Onward! 2011 and Splash 2011 conferences, Portland, Oregon, October 24, 2011. On-line pdf <http://ecs.victoria.ac.nz/twiki/pub/Events/PLATEAU/Program/plateau2011-lato za.pdf> or local pdf <http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~natprog/papers/plateau2011-latoza.pdf> . 4. Thomas D. LaToza and Brad A. Myers. "Hard-to-Answer Questions about Code," Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Evaluation and Usability of Programming Languages and Tools (PLATEAU'2010) at SPLASH/Onward! 2010, October 18, 2010, Reno, NV. pdf <http://ecs.victoria.ac.nz/twiki/pub/Events/PLATEAU/2010Program/plateau10-la toza.pdf> 5. Thomas D. LaToza, Brad A. Myers. "On the Importance of Understanding the Strategies that Developers Use", Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering (CHASE), An ICSE 2010 Workshop. May 2, 2010. Cape Town, South Africa. pp. 72-75. pdf <http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tlatoza/chase10-final.pdf> APIs: 6. Brad A. Myers, Sae Young Jeong, Yingyu Xie, Jack Beaton, Jeff Stylos, Ralf Ehret, Jan Karstens, Arkin Efeoglu, Daniela K. Busse. "Studying the Documentation of an API for Enterprise Service-Oriented Architecture". The Journal of Organizational and End User Computing, JOEUC, a publication of the Information Resources Management Association, IGI Publishing. Special Issue on End-User Development. vol. 22, no. 1, Jan-Mar, 2010. pp. 23-51. IGI global <http://www.igi-global.com/bookstore/article.aspx?titleid=39119> , DOI: 10.4018/joeuc.2010101903. 7. Jeffrey Stylos, Brad A. Myers. "The Implications of Method Placement on API Learnability," Sixteenth ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE 2008). Atlanta, GA, November 9-14, 2008. 105-112. pdf <http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~NatProg/papers/FSE2008-p105-stylos.pdf> or ACM version <http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1453101.1453117> 8. Jeffrey Stylos and Brad Myers, "Mapping the Space of API Design Decisions," 2007 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing, VL/HCC'07. Sept 23-27, 2007, Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. pp. 50-57. pdf <http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~NatProg/papers/Stylos2007APIDesignDecisions.pdf> 9. Brian Ellis, Jeffrey Stylos, and Brad Myers. "The Factory Pattern in API Design: A Usability Evaluation". International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE'2007). May 20-26, 2007. Minneapolis, MN. pp. 302-312. ACM <http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1248863> or local pdf <http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~natprog/papers/Ellis2007FactoryUsability.pdf> Learning: 10. Andrew J. Ko, Brad A. Myers, and Htet Htet Aung. "Six Learning Barriers in End-User Programming Systems." VL/HCC'04 <http://vlhcc04.dsi.uniroma1.it/index.php> : IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing, Rome, Italy, September 26-29, 2004. pp. 199-206. pdf <http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ajko/papers/Ko2004LearningBarriers.pdf> Brad A. Myers Professor Human-Computer Interaction Institute School of Computer Science Carnegie Mellon University 5000 Forbes Avenue Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3891 (412) 268-5150 FAX: (412) 268-1266 b...@cs.cmu.edu http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bam -----Original Message----- From: Derek M Jones [mailto:de...@knosof.co.uk] Sent: Thursday, February 21, 2013 11:34 AM To: PPIG Discuss Subject: Empirical data wanted All, I'm working on another book: http://shape-of-code.coding-guidelines.com/2012/06/22/background-to-my-book- project-empirical-software-engineering-with-r/ and am after empirical data. If anybody can point me at publicly available data or is willing to send me data that I can make public it would be much appreciated. For those of you who missed the discussion last time around my previous book attempted to use results from cognitive psychology to understand developer characteristics: www.knosof.co.uk/cbook and also had a strong empirical flavor. You can read about my own experimental work + and data here: www.knosof.co.uk/dev-experiment.html -- Derek M. Jones tel: +44 (0) 1252 520 667 Knowledge Software Ltd blog:shape-of-code.coding-guidelines.com Software analysis http://www.knosof.co.uk -- The Open University is incorporated by Royal Charter (RC 000391), an exempt charity in England & Wales and a charity registered in Scotland (SC 038302).
