Two studies of opportunistic programming: interleaving web foraging, learning, and writing code

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates the role of online resources in problem solving. We look specifically at how programmers - an exemplar form of knowledge workers - opportunistically interleave Web foraging, learning, and writing code. We describe two studies of how programmers use online resources. The first, conducted in the lab, observed participants' Web use while building an online chat room. We found that programmers leverage online resources with a range of intentions: They engage in just-in-time learning of new skills and approaches, clarify and extend their existing knowledge, and remind themselves of details deemed not worth remembering. The results also suggest that queries for different purposes have different styles and durations. Do programmers' queries "in the wild" have the same range of intentions, or is this result an artifact of the particular lab setting? We analyzed a month of queries to an online programming portal, examining the lexical structure, refinements made, and result pages visited. Here we also saw traits that suggest the Web is being used for learning and reminding. These results contribute to a theory of online resource usage in programming, and suggest opportunities for tools to facilitate online knowledge work.

REFERENCES

• 1: Adobe Flex Developer Center, 2008. http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/.
• 2: Sushil Bajracharya , Trung Ngo , Erik Linstead , Yimeng Dou , Paul Rigor , Pierre Baldi , Cristina Lopes, Sourcerer: a search engine for open source code supporting structure-based search, Companion to the 21st ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Object-oriented programming systems, languages, and applications, October 22-26, 2006, Portland, Oregon, USA [doi>10.1145/1176617.1176671]
• 3: Ira D. Baxter , Andrew Yahin , Leonardo Moura , Marcelo Sant'Anna , Lorraine Bier, Clone Detection Using Abstract Syntax Trees, Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Maintenance, p.368, March 16-19, 1998
• 4: Joel Brandt , Philip J. Guo , Joel Lewenstein , Scott R. Klemmer, Opportunistic programming: how rapid ideation and prototyping occur in practice, Proceedings of the 4th international workshop on End-user software engineering, p.1-5, May 12-12, 2008, Leipzig, Germany [doi>10.1145/1370847.1370848]
• 5: S. Carter, J. Mankoff, S. R. Klemmer, and T. Matthews. Exiting the Cleanroom: On Ecological Validity and Ubiquitous Computing. Human-Computer Interaction, 23(1):47--99, 2008.
• 6: Jan Chong , Rosanne Siino, Interruptions on software teams: a comparison of paired and solo programmers, Proceedings of the 2006 20th anniversary conference on Computer supported cooperative work, November 04-08, 2006, Banff, Alberta, Canada [doi>10.1145/1180875.1180882]
• 7: Chun Wei Choo , Brian Detlor , Don Turnbull, Web Work: Information Seeking and Knowledge Work on the World Wide Web, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Norwell, MA, 2000
• 8: S. Clarke. What is an End-User Software Engineer? In End-User Software Engineering Dagstuhl Seminar, Dagstuhl, Germany, 2007.
• 9: A. L. Cox and R. M. Young. Device-Oriented and Task-Oriented Exploratory Learning of Interactive Devices. Proceedings of ICCM 2000: International Conference on Cognitive Modeling, pages 70--77, 2000.
• 10: Stéphane Ducasse , Matthias Rieger , Serge Demeyer, A Language Independent Approach for Detecting Duplicated Code, Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance, p.109, August 30-September 03, 1999
• 11: Françoise Détienne , Frank Bott, Software design---cognitive aspects, Springer-Verlag New York, Inc., New York, NY, 2001
• 12: C. Grimes, D. Tang, and D. M. Russell. Query Logs Alone are Not Enough. In Workshop on Query Log Analysis at WWW 2007: International World Wide Web Conference, Banff, Alberta, Canada, 2007.
• 13: Björn Hartmann , Scott Doorley , Scott R. Klemmer, Hacking, Mashing, Gluing: Understanding Opportunistic Design, IEEE Pervasive Computing, v.7 n.3, p.46-54, July 2008 [doi>10.1109/MPRV.2008.54]
• 14: Björn Hartmann , Leslie Wu , Kevin Collins , Scott R. Klemmer, Programming by a sample: rapidly creating web applications with d.mix, Proceedings of the 20th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology, October 07-10, 2007, Newport, Rhode Island, USA [doi>10.1145/1294211.1294254]
• 15: Raphael Hoffmann , James Fogarty , Daniel S. Weld, Assieme: finding and leveraging implicit references in a web search interface for programmers, Proceedings of the 20th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology, October 07-10, 2007, Newport, Rhode Island, USA [doi>10.1145/1294211.1294216]
• 16: James Hollan , Edwin Hutchins , David Kirsh, Distributed cognition: toward a new foundation for human-computer interaction research, ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), v.7 n.2, p.174-196, June 2000 [doi>10.1145/353485.353487]
• 17: Andrew Hunt , David Thomas, The pragmatic programmer: from journeyman to master, Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, 2000
• 18: Miryung Kim , Lawrence Bergman , Tessa Lau , David Notkin, An Ethnographic Study of Copy and Paste Programming Practices in OOPL, Proceedings of the 2004 International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering, p.83-92, August 19-20, 2004 [doi>10.1109/ISESE.2004.10]
• 19: Andrew J. Ko , Brad A. Myers , Htet Htet Aung, Six Learning Barriers in End-User Programming Systems, Proceedings of the 2004 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages - Human Centric Computing, p.199-206, September 26-29, 2004 [doi>10.1109/VLHCC.2004.47]
• 20: Tessa Lau , Eric Horvitz, Patterns of search: analyzing and modeling Web query refinement, Proceedings of the seventh international conference on User modeling, p.119-128, June 1999, Banff, Canada
• 21: Henry Lieberman , Fabio Paternò , Volker Wulf, End User Development (Human-Computer Interaction Series), Springer-Verlag New York, Inc., Secaucus, NJ, 2006
• 22: Greg Little , Robert C. Miller, Translating keyword commands into executable code, Proceedings of the 19th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology, October 15-18, 2006, Montreux, Switzerland [doi>10.1145/1166253.1166275]
• 23: Allan MacLean , Kathleen Carter , Lennart Lövstrand , Thomas Moran, User-tailorable systems: pressing the issues with buttons, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems: Empowering people, p.175-182, April 01-05, 1990, Seattle, Washington, United States [doi>10.1145/97243.97271]
• 24: David Mandelin , Lin Xu , Rastislav Bodík , Doug Kimelman, Jungloid mining: helping to navigate the API jungle, Proceedings of the 2005 ACM SIGPLAN conference on Programming language design and implementation, June 12-15, 2005, Chicago, IL, USA
• 25: Robert Cecil Martin, Agile Software Development: Principles, Patterns, and Practices, Prentice Hall PTR, Upper Saddle River, NJ, 2003
• 26: Richard E. Mayer, The Psychology of How Novices Learn Computer Programming, ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), v.13 n.1, p.121-141, March 1981 [doi>10.1145/356835.356841]
• 27: Brad Myers , Sun Young Park , Yoko Nakano , Greg Mueller , Andrew Ko, How designers design and program interactive behaviors, Proceedings of the 2008 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing, p.177-184, September 15-19, 2008 [doi>10.1109/VLHCC.2008.4639081]
• 28: Peter L. T. Pirolli, Information Foraging Theory: Adaptive Interaction with Information, Oxford University Press, Inc., New York, NY, 2007
• 29: Naiyana Sahavechaphan , Kajal Claypool, XSnippet: mining For sample code, ACM SIGPLAN Notices, v.41 n.10, October 2006
• 30: C. Scaffidi, M. Shaw, and B. A. Myers. Estimating the Numbers of End Users and End User Programmers. pages 207--214, Dallas, Texas, 2005.
• 31: Craig Silverstein , Hannes Marais , Monika Henzinger , Michael Moricz, Analysis of a very large web search engine query log, ACM SIGIR Forum, v.33 n.1, p.6-12, Fall 1999 [doi>10.1145/331403.331405]
• 32: Jeffrey Stylos , Brad A. Myers, Mica: A Web-Search Tool for Finding API Components and Examples, Proceedings of the Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing, p.195-202, September 04-08, 2006 [doi>10.1109/VLHCC.2006.32]
• 33: S. Turkle and S. Papert. Epistemological Pluralism: Styles and Voices within the Computer Culture. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 16(1), 1990.
• 34: Jeffrey Wong, Marmite: Towards End-User Programming for the Web, Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing, p.270-271, September 23-27, 2007 [doi>10.1109/VLHCC.2007.38]
• 35: Ron B. Yeh , Andreas Paepcke , Scott R. Klemmer, Iterative design and evaluation of an event architecture for pen-and-paper interfaces, Proceedings of the 21st annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology, October 19-22, 2008, Monterey, CA, USA [doi>10.1145/1449715.1449734]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)
          Subjects: Prototyping

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)
          Subjects: User-centered design

General Terms:
Human Factors

Keywords:
copy-and-paste, opportunistic programming, prototyping