Research

TagSEA is developed by researchers at the University of Victoria and at IBM Cambridge. Our development of this tool is an iterative process that involves both implementation and evaluation. We are conducting a series of user studies to determine how software developers are using our tool and how we can improve it.

The results of our studies are available on this site (see results) and in our publications.

If you would like to contribute to this project by being a part of our studies, please contact Dr. Margaret-Anne Storey (email: mstorey@uvic.ca)

Results of Code Commenting Survey

In April 2007, we asked software developers how they comment their code in a survey posted using SurveyMonkey. The survey was posted on the blog of Bjorn Freeman-Benson, and showed up on PlanetEclipse.

Here is a summary of the results (pdf) of the survey. The results of two of the questions were open-ended; the results from these questions are displayed below. The free-form responses at the end are not shown here to presereve anonymity.

Q: How many years have you been programming professionally?

# of responses = 81

Min: 0
Average: 9.3
Max: 25
Standard deviation: 6.6

Q: Based on your most recent team experience, how many programmers work in your team (including yourself)?

# of responses = 70

Min: 2
Average: 9.2
Max: 100
Standard dev: 14.2

Please see the pdf file for the rest of the results.

We'd like to thank Bjorn Freeman-Benson for blogging about the survey, as well as all of the people who helped out by completing the survey. Thanks!

Publications

How Programmers can Turn Comments into Waypoints for Code Navigation
Storey, M.-A., L.-T. Cheng, J. Singer, M. Muller, D. Myers, J. Ryall, "How Programmers can Turn Comments into Waypoints for Code Navigation", In Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Mining, October 2-5, 2007, Paris, France.

Presentations by Programmers for Programmers.
Cheng, L., M. Desmond, and M.-A. Storey, "Presentations by Programmers for Programmers", In Proceedings of the 29th international Conference on Software Engineering, May 20 - 26, 2007, Minneapolis, United States.

Shared Waypoints and Social Tagging to Support Collaboration in Software Development
Storey, M.-A., L.-T. Cheng, P. Rigby and R.I. Bull, "Shared Waypoints and Social Tagging to Support Collaboration in Software Development", In Proceedings of CSCW 2006: ACM Computer Supported Cooperative Work 2006, November 4-8, Banff, Canada.

Waypointing and Social Tagging to Support Program Navigation
Storey, M.-A., L.-T. Cheng, R.I. Bull and P. Rigby, "Waypointing and Social Tagging to Support Program Navigation", CHI Extended Abstracts, April 22-26, 2006, Montreal, Canada.

Tags for Software Engineering Activities in Eclipse (TagSEA)
is a research collaboration between the University of Victoria's Computer Human Interaction & Software Engineering Lab and the IBM Watson Research Centre.