Adaptive Developer Tools

Our society relies heavily on software, and working software is many times critical. Program analysis aims to assist with development of high quality software. However, software developers are having usability issues with program analysis results and are missing out on potentially useful information.The purpose of this project is to explore how adaptive developer tools can make program analysis more useful. The specific goals are to learn more about the interaction between software developers and program analysis results, to investigate how use of program analysis results can be automatically detected, to explore how the presentation of results can be tuned via feedback of use, and to experiment with different presentation strategies in order to optimize for use. The project will be carried out by the applicant and a research assistant, in collaboration with colleagues with long experience in user experience research and empirical software engineering research. The project starts with a case study, to learn more about the domain, and is followed by three iterations of prototype development and mixed-method experiments, with roughly one iteration per year.The project has the potential of removing prohibiting usability issues with program analysis, and fully utilized program analysis has the promise of assisting developers in producing higher quality code.