JASPER: Facilitating Software Maintenance Activities With Explicit Task Representations

JASPER is the system I am building for my Master's thesis. My advisor is Brad Myers with lots of assistance from Andy Ko.

Abstract:

Recent research has shown that developers spend an average of 35% of their time performing navigations around code. Much of this time is spent on redundant navigations to code that the developer previously found. This is necessary because existing development environments do not enable users to easily keep relevant information, such as web pages, textual notes, and code, visible during their tasks. Instead, users must constantly switch among and re-navigate to the various relevant artifacts. JASPER is a new system that allows users to collect relevant artifacts into a working set for easy reference. These artifacts are visible in a single view that represents the user's current task and allows users to easily make each artifact visible within its context. Users collect relevant artifacts pertaining to each task when switching among several tasks, so a distinct working set is maintained for each task. These working sets can be saved to disk and later loaded, so that users may return to tasks later and share task information with colleagues.

We predict that JASPER will significantly reduce time spent on redundant navigations. In addition, JASPER will facilitate multitasking, interruption management, and sharing task information with other developers. JASPER could be integrated with other tools, such as existing source code suggestion tools, to permit users to more easily collect and maintain sets of task-relevant information.

Thesis Document

The thesis document is available as a PDF (1.1 MB).

Thesis Document (PDF)

OOPSLA ETX 2006

A paper was published at the Eclipse Technology Exchange, a workshop at OOPSLA. The paper is available as a PDF (312 KB).

ETX Paper (PDF)