Section: New Results

IDE for Reengineers

Participants : Stéphane Ducasse, David Rothlisberger.

Navigating large software systems is difficult as they are composed of numerous artifacts distributed in a huge space, with relationships between artifacts that often remain hidden and obscure. As a consequence, developers using a modern interactive development environment (IDE) are forced to open views on numerous source artifacts to reveal these hidden relationships, leading to a crowded workspace with many opened windows or tabs. Developers often lose the high level view in such a cluttered workspace as IDEs provide little support to get rid of unused windows. AutumnLeaves automatically selects windows unlikely to be needed in the future to be closed or grayed out while other important ones are displayed more prominently. This reduces the number of windows opened at a time and adds structure to the developer's workspace. We validated AutumnLeaves with a benchmark evaluation using recorded navigation data of various developers to determine the prediction quality of our algorithms [28] , [26] . Mainstream IDEs generally rely on the static structure of a software project to support browsing and navigating it. We propose HeatMaps, a simple but highly configurable technique to enrich the way an IDE displays the static structure of a software system with additional kinds of information. A heatmap highlights software artifacts according to various metric values, such as bright red or pale blue, to indicate their potential degree of interest. We present a prototype system that implements heatmaps, and we describe an initial study that assesses the degree to which different heatmaps effectively guide developers in navigating software [27] .