Causette: User-Controlled Rearrangement of Causal Constructs in a Code Editor

Programming interaction usually involves specifying causal relationships such as input events triggering a state change or the propagation of values. Such code may reside in several locations and its execution is driven by multiple causal chains, which hinders the programmer's ability to unders...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:2022 IEEE/ACM 30th International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC) pp. 241 - 252
Main Authors: Martin, Alice, Magnaudet, Mathieu, Conversy, Stephane
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Published: ACM 01.05.2022
Subjects:
causality
code visualization
Codes
Interaction programming
Programming
Task analysis
Visualization
ISSN:2643-7171
Online Access:Get full text
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Description
Summary:Programming interaction usually involves specifying causal relationships such as input events triggering a state change or the propagation of values. Such code may reside in several locations and its execution is driven by multiple causal chains, which hinders the programmer's ability to understand and fix it. We designed Causette, a set of four novel interaction techniques for a code editor. They consist in rearranging causal constructs on demand to make the code representation consistent with the causal chain being ana-lyzed by the user. We ran an experiment showing that Causette may be more usable than a regular editor for some code understanding tasks. This work suggests that rearranging interaction code may help developers better understand and fix it.
ISSN:2643-7171
DOI:10.1145/3524610.3527885