Understanding and Evaluating Developer Behaviour in Programming Tasks

To evaluate how developers perform differently in solving programming tasks, i.e., which actions and behaviours are more beneficial to them than others and if there are any specific strategies and behaviours that may indicate good versus poor understanding of the task and program given to them, we used the MIMESIS plug-in to record developers' interactions with the IDE. In a series of three studies we investigated the specific behaviour of developers solving a specific programming task. We focused on which source code files they visited, how they related pieces of code and knowledge to others and when and how successful they performed code edits. To cope with the variety of behaviours due to interpersonal differences such as different level of knowledge, development style or problem solving stratiegies, we used an abstraction of the observed behaviour, which enables for a better comparison between different individual attributes such as skill, speed and used stratiegies and also facilitates later automatic evaluation of behaviours, i.e. by using a software to react to.