Sihan Li, Hucheng Zhou, Haoxiang Lin, Tian Xiao, Haibo Lin, Wei Lin, and Tao Xie: “A Characteristic Study on Failures of Production Distributed Data-Parallel Programs“. Proc. ICSE 2013. SCOPE is adopted by thousands of developers from tens of different product teams in Microsoft Bing for daily web-scale data processing, including index building, search ranking, and [...]
Browsing Posts in Usability
Chris Parnin, Spencer Rugaber. “Programmer Information Needs After Memory Failure“. ICPC 2012. Despite its vast capacity and associative powers, the human brain does not deal well with interruptions. Particularly in situations where information density is high, such as during a programming task, recovering from an interruption requires extensive time and effort. Although modern program development environments [...]
Thomas Green and Marian Petre, “Usability Analysis of Visual Programming Environments: a ‘cognitive dimensions’ framework”, Visual Languages and Computing, 7:131—174, 1996. The cognitive dimensions framework is a broad-brush evaluation technique for interactive devices and for non-interactive notations. It sets out a small vocabulary of terms designed to capture the cognitively-relevant aspects of structure, and shows [...]
Like a lot of people (particularly those with engineering backgrounds), I was very excited when UML first appeared in the mid-1990s. “At last,” I thought, “Programmers will have something like blueprints and circuit diagrams to help them design software.” I knew they’d be better than flowcharts: after all, they were object-oriented, which back then was [...]
Jeffrey Stylos and Steven Clarke: “Usability Implications of Requiring Parameters in Objects’ Constructors.” ICSE 2007. The usability of APIs is increasingly important to programmer productivity. Based on experience with usability studies of specific APIs, techniques were explored for studying the usability of design choices common to many APIs. A comparative study was performed to assess [...]
Kathryn Stolee and Sebastian Elbaum, “Refactoring Pipe-like Mashups for End-User Programmers”. ICSE 2011: Mashups are becoming increasingly popular as end users are able to easily access, manipulate, and compose data from many web sources. We have observed, however, that mashups tend to suffer from deficiencies that propagate as mashups are reused. To address these deficiencies, [...]
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