A Tool for Non-Intrusive and Privacy-Preserving Developers' Programming Activity Data Collection

摘要

The quality of software products is closely related to software developers. A good psychological state can improve the quality of software products to a certain extent. More and more researchers are beginning to study how to effectively identify the psychological state of developers to help their work. However, many of these works have a significant intrusion into developers and are not suitable for long-term deployment in real enterprises. In this paper, we present a tool for IDE-based programming activity data collection for software developers. A conceptual model is presented for raw data collection and hierarchical concept encapsulation. We implement this tool in the form of an IDE plug-in for popular IDEs including IntelliJ IDEA and Android Studio, which can collect and process developers' in-IDE activity data in a non-intrusive and privacy-preserving manner. To demonstrate its usefulness, we deploy the proposed tool in a real enterprise environment. Based on this tool and the data collected in the real enterprise environment, we build applications including programming activity statistics and flow state recognition. The experiment results suggest the proposed approach can effectively capture the detailed programming activities and perform flow state recognition. The recognition accuracy is 80.14%.