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Code bubbles: a working set-based interface for code understanding and maintenance

Published: 10 April 2010 Publication History

Abstract

Developers spend significant time reading and navigating code fragments spread across multiple locations. The file-based nature of contemporary IDEs makes it prohibitively difficult to create and maintain a simultaneous view of such fragments. We propose a novel user interface metaphor for code understanding based on collections of lightweight, editable fragments called bubbles, which form concurrently visible working sets. We present the results of a qualitative usability evaluation, and the results of a quantitative study which indicates Code Bubbles significantly improved code understanding time, while reducing navigation interactions over a widely-used IDE, for two controlled tasks.

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  • (2024)Bridging Incremental Programming and Complex Software Development EnvironmentsProceedings of the 3rd ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Programming Abstractions and Interactive Notations, Tools, and Environments10.1145/3689488.3689991(29-40)Online publication date: 18-Oct-2024
  • (2024)Supporting Construction of Domain-Specific Representations in Textual Source CodeProceedings of the 3rd ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Programming Abstractions and Interactive Notations, Tools, and Environments10.1145/3689488.3689990(17-28)Online publication date: 18-Oct-2024
  • (2024)Meta-Manager: A Tool for Collecting and Exploring Meta Information about CodeProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642676(1-17)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
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cover image ACM Conferences
CHI '10: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
April 2010
2690 pages
ISBN:9781605589299
DOI:10.1145/1753326
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 10 April 2010

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  1. bubbles
  2. java
  3. multi-view
  4. simultaneous views
  5. source code

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