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
[email protected]
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bam
-Original Message-
From: Derek M Jones [mailto:[email protected]]
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
