Artifact Driven Communication to Improve Program Comprehension

摘要

Developer communication is an important factor during program comprehension. Live programming environments encourage developers to comprehend applications through manipulation of running instances-liveness. Such application exploration is interrupted whenever programmers need to communicate an issue with dislocated co-workers. Describing the issue becomes challenging as programmers use text based communication mediums, e.g., emails or chats. The issues are magnified during bug day events, where developers around the world meet together in order to improve a project. Communication and coordination need to be increased, but the infrastructure stays the same. We target the research gap by introducing the COLLABORATIVE PLAYGROUND, a tool that exposes liveness into developer communication during programming change tasks and integrates coordination needs during bug day events. We will evaluate our approach by deploying the COLLABORATIVE PLAYGROUND during a series of Bug Day events for Pharo, one of the most active live programming platforms in existence.