(r372) DuckyHomework < Main

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---+ Ducky's Homework / Research
I am working for Gail Murphy, looking at programmer productivity.  I will be writing an Eclipse plug-in that is designed to help people navigate through code more easily, then running a user study to see if it really does help.

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---++ Current TBDs
   * design experiment
      * buncha people doing same task in controlled environment or lotsa people doin' their own thing?
      * each person do all conditions (e.g. control AND "try BFS" AND "use BFN tools") or each person does one condition?
      * which tasks?  use one previously done?
      * which participants?  Gail thinks pros are more publishable.
   * write tool to analyze the nav tracks of BSD's data
      * investigate [[http://www.prefuse.org][Prefuse]] (Java, easier)
        * download
        * read manual
        * do a toy problem
      * if needed, investigate GraphViz (http://www.graphviz.org/)
      * Can GnuPlot do it for me?
   * Talk to Leah re finding BFN
   * come up with numerical measures for BFN
      * back button presses
      * edit ratio
      * Rob's thesis mentions that 58-81% of web navigation is to previously seen pages [Dumais et al], but passes on saying what % is for source.  That would be interesting to try to pull out of Mylar data. 
   * write fake intro
      * get solid on the citations
   * write the actual plug-in, perhaps using quickmarks as a bit of a guide

   * Bannon et al: "[D]igressions are frequent.  When a record is made of these commands as they occur temporarily, as in the history list, information on the tasks and goals of the users is lost." (where is this from?)




---++ Current hypotheses
   * H0: Most of time "wasted" is due to false hypotheses.  (is there a ko paper that says so?)
   * H1: Breadth-first search of the hypothesis space reduces the amount of time spent on false hypotheses on average.
   * H2: Breadth-first navigation helps BFS => BFN when seeking verification for a hypothesis is on average faster than a depth-first navigation
   * H3: The following things will result in users using BFN more often.
      * H3.1: tabs staying in once place
      * H3.2: tabs being containers for a _task_ rather than a _file_ (more like Firefox)
      * H3.3: making the back/forward button history only contain what was looked at in that tab, vs. everything in the global history
      * H3.3: marking "special" places in the history drop-down with icons
         * classes/methods reached via a search
         * classes/methods reached via the package explorer
         * (Question: what about reached from Outline View? Class Hierarchy view? QuickOutline)
         * (Question: do I want to insert a right arrow if they did declaration and left if they did references?  What about a refs/declr search?)
      * H3.4: making search results visually distinctive if they have gone there recently
      * H3.5: allowing people to see two places in one file more easily is useful
   * H4: telling people that BFN is a better approach
   * (H5: telling people to write down three hypotheses is useful)



---++ Research
   * <strike>DuckyThesisProposalNotes</strike>



---+++ Code base -- code obfuscators?
   * [[http://www.acm.org/crossroads/xrds4-3/codeob.html][Low Crossroads paper on obfuscation]]



---++ More generic, old
   * Potential future study
      * Read ethics materials, including [[http://www.ors.ubc.ca/ethics/clinical/CREB_GN/BREB_Guidance_Notes.html][Guidelines]]
      * Discuss ethics w/Gail
      * Look at previous ethics submissions
      * DuckyEthicsDraft



---++ Need academic ref
   * [[http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/HighNotes.html][reference to Stanley Eisenstat yale cs 323]] time vs. outcome studies


---++ Interesting references for me to chase down
   * Cross, E. The behavioral styles of computer programmers. in Proc 8th Annual SIGCPR Conference. 1970. Maryland, WA, USA.

   * Mayer, D.B. and A.W. Stalnaker. Selection and Evaluation of Computer Personnel – the Research History of SIG/CPR. in Proc 1968 23rd ACM National Conference,. 1968. Las Vegas, NV, USA.

   * Michael McCracken, Vicki Almstrum, Danny Diaz, Mark Guzdial, Dianne Hagan, Yifat Ben- David Kolikant, Cary Laxer, Lynda Thomas, Ian Utting, and Tadeusz Wilusz. A multinational, multi-institutional study of assessment of programming skills of first-year CS students. In Working group reports from ITiCSE on Innovation and technology in computer science education, Canterbury, UK, 2001. ACM Press.

   * B Adelson and E Soloway. The role of domain experience in software design. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 11(November):1351–1360, 1985.
   * Jeffrey Bonar and Elliot Soloway. Uncovering principles of novice programming. In 10th ACM POPL, pages 10–13, 1983.

and other references from [[http://www.cs.mdx.ac.uk/research/PhDArea/saeed/paper1.pdf][This Camel Has Two Humps]] and [[http://www.cs.mdx.ac.uk/research/PhDArea/saeed/S_Dehnadi_ppij-2006__2.pdf][Testing Programming Aptitude]]

 [[http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:5sZH4p3h9h8J:www.cis.strath.ac.uk/~linxiao/TechReport2006.doc+students+who+had+a+consistent+model+did+better+than+inconsistent+model+even+when+wrong&hl=en&gl=ca&ct=clnk&cd=9&client=firefox][follow-on to the camel]]

---+ Links to software tools
   * http://www.sei.cmu.edu/publications/documents/97.reports/97tr012/97tr012title.htm 
   * http://valgrind.org/downloads/current.html
   * http://valgrind.org/downloads/variants.html
   * http://www.ndparking.com/stlabs.com
   * http://lclint.cs.virginia.edu/
   * http://www.st.cs.uni-sb.de/eclipse/
   * http://www.cs.wisc.edu/cbi/
daikon
   * http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?DoNotUseAssertions
   * http://www.research.att.com/viewProject.cfm?prjID=67
   * http://www.parasoft.com/jsp/home.jsp
   * http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~davida/guard/
   * http://www.sos.cs.ru.nl/research/escjava/
   * http://www.cs.iastate.edu/~leavens/JML/
   * http://www.gnu.org/software/ddd/
   * http://www.codesurfer.com/products/codesurfer/overview.html
   * http://www.st.cs.uni-sb.de/dd/
   * http://www.cs.nmsu.edu/~jeffery/aadebug.html
   * http://www.checkpointing.org/
   * http://www.gnu.org/software/nana/nana.html
   * DDD - gui debugger front-end, probably not that interesting since Eclipse has a gui debugger
   * http://www.eclipseplugincentral.com/Web_Links-index-req-viewlink-cid-830.html AskIgor 

---+ Research aids
   * [[http://eclipseplugincentral.com/Web_Links-index-req-viewlink-cid-163.html][ecleTeX]] -- has anyone used this?
   * Zotero -- firefox-based note keeper

   * Set ALLOWTOPICCHANGE = DuckySherwood, GailMurphy