Hello everybody.
I'm a PhD student studying with Gail Murphy at the University of
British Columbia. I'm looking into alleviating the loss of context
experienced by programmers during development. I'm focussing
specifically on expert programmers dealing with large systems, such
as Eclipse. By loss of context, I mean that they `get lost',
forgetting what they were doing. It seems similar to the `lost in
hyperspace' problem experienced in hypertext, and there are elements
of information overload as well.
This loss of context seems to happen for two reasons: they forget
what they are doing while browsing and understanding the code
(perhaps due to information overload), or are distracted from their
original task and unable to remember what they were doing (digression).
I hoped for pointers to known related work (I haven't found any),
or to similar situations. I think I have a pretty good handle on
the hypertext problem, and I've found some material about affordances
and browsing/navigating of electronic text.
Thanks!
Brian.
--
Brian de Alwis | Graduate student | Software Practices Lab | UBC
"Passivity & cynicism have always come easily to the educated." - Ed Broadbent
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