Supporting Developer-onboarding with Enhanced Resource Finding and Visual Exploration

Authors

Jianguo Wang, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow

First Advisor

Anita Sarma

Date of this Version

Spring 4-4-2012

Document Type

Thesis

Comments

A thesis presented to the faculty of the Graduate College at the University of Nebraska in partial fulfillment of requirements for the degree of Master of Science

Major: Computer Science

Under the supervision of Professor Anita Sarma. Lincoln, Nebraska, February2012

Copyright (c) 2012 Jianguo Wang

Abstract

Understanding the basic structure of a code base and a development team are essential to get new developers up to speed in a software development project. Developers do so through the process of early experimentation with code and the creation of mental models of technical and social structures in a project. However, getting up-to-speed in a new project can be challenging due to difficulties in: finding the right place to begin explorations, expanding the focus to determine relevant resources for tasks, and identifying dependencies across project elements to gain a high-level overview of project structures. In this thesis, I first identified six challenges that developers face during the process of developer onboarding from recent research studies and informal interviews with developers. To address these challenges, I implemented automated tool support with enhanced resource finding and visual exploration. Specifically, I proposed six functional requirements for supporting developers onboarding. I then extended the project tool Tesseract to support these functionalities to help novice developers find relevant resources (files, developers, bugs, etc.) and understand project structures when joining a new project. To understand how the onboarding functionalities work in supporting developers' onboarding process, I conducted a user study with typical onboarding tasks requiring early experimentation and internalizing project structures. The results indicated that enhanced search features, the ability to explore semantic relationships across repositories, and network-centric visualizations of project structures were very effective in supporting onboarding.

Advisor: Anita Sarma