Tackling Software Navigation Issues of the Smalltalk IDE

Tackling Software Navigation Issues of the Smalltalk IDE

David Röthlisberger, Oscar Nierstrasz,

Alexandre Bergel and Stéphane Ducasse

University of Bern, Switzerland

Universidad de Chile, Chile

INRIA-Lille Nord Europe, France

Navigation of Source Space

to gain understanding,

to locate the cause of a defect,

to implement new features, or

to refactor

Smalltalk IDE

Problem Indicators

Task: Defect correction by 20 different developers during 30 minutes

Number of window switches: 38.85

Number of entities revisited: 35.10 (45%)

Edit / Navigation ratio 2.85%

Number of navigation actions until first edit 52.14

Number of navigation actions between two edits 19.31

- Much navigation required to locate broken artifacts.

- Many windows opened, many switches between windows

- Many source entities visited over and over again

How to improve software navigation?

What is missing in the IDE?

Working Sets

Runtime Information Distributed Code

Window Plague

Hidden Dependencies

Smart Groups

Navigation History

Multiple Methods

Package View

Hierarchy View

Dependency View

Icons

Traits Integration

Dynamic Information

Autumn Leaves

Summary

Questions?Runtime Information

Distributed Code

Window Plague

Working Sets Hidden Dependencies