Semi-Automatic, Inline and Collaborative Web Page Code Curations

Abstract

Software developers spend about a quarter of their workday using the web to fulfill various information needs. Searching for relevant information online can be time-consuming, yet acquired information is rarely systematically persisted for later reference. In this work, we introduce SALI, an approach for semi-automated inline linking of web pages to source code locations. SALI helps developers naturally capture high-quality, explicit links between web pages and specific source code lo-cations by recommending links for curation within the IDE. Through two laboratory studies, we examined the developer's ability to both curate and consume links between web pages and specific source code locations while performing software development tasks. The studies were performed with 20 subjects working on realistic software change tasks from widely-used open-source projects. Results show that developers continuously and concisely curate web pages at meaningful locations in the code with little effort. Additionally, we found that other developers could use these curations while performing new and different change tasks to speed up relevant information gathering within unfamiliar codebases by a factor of 2.4.