Live software documentation of design pattern instances

To evaluate this approach, we conducted a controlled experiment with 21 novice developers. We asked participants to complete three tasks that involved <i>understanding</i> and <i>evolving</i> small software systems-up to six classes and 100 lines of code-and recorded the duration and the number of context switches. The results show that our approach helps developers spend less time understanding and documenting a software system when compared to using tools with a lower degree of liveness. Additionally, embedding documentation in the IDE and maintaining it close to the source code reduces context switching significantly.