Tracking and analyzing cross-cutting activities in developers' daily work

Abstract

Developers use many software applications to process large amounts of diverse information in their daily work. The information is usually meaningful beyond the context of an application that manages it. However, as different applications function independently, developers have to manually track, correlate and re-find cross-cutting information across separate applications. We refer to this difficulty as information fragmentation problem. In this paper, we present ActivitySpace, an interapplication activity tracking and analysis framework for tackling information fragmentation problem in software development. ActivitySpace can monitor the developer's activity in many applications at a low enough level to obviate application-specific support while accounting for the ways by which low-level activity information can be effectively aggregated to reflect the developer's activity at higher-level of abstraction. A system prototype has been implemented on Microsoft Windows. Our preliminary user study showed that the ActivitySpace system is promising in supporting interapplication information needs in developers' daily work.