A Retrospective on How Developers Seek, Relate, and Collect Information About Code
In the early 2000s, software development was shifting from offline to online, and from command line to IDE. We discuss our 2004 paper examining the impact of this shift on developers’ program comprehension behaviors, our motivation for the work, and it's impact on the last twenty years of empirical studies and developer tool innovations. We end with a discussion of the possible unintended impacts LLMs have on program comprehension in the coming decades.
Authors
- Brad A. Myers (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4769-0219)
- Amy J. Ko (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7461-4783)
- Michael Coblenz (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9369-4069)
- Htet Htet Aung (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0890-144X)
Institutions
- University of Washington (US)
- University of California San Diego (US)
- Science Exchange (United States) (US)
- Carnegie Mellon University (US)
Publication Details
- Journal
- IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
- Published
- 2025-01-27
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1109/tse.2025.3534071
- Primary Topic
- Software Engineering Research
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00