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How Software Developers Use Tagging to Support Reminding and Refinding
July/August 2009 (vol. 35 no. 4)
pp. 470-483
ASCII Text
x 
 
Margaret-Anne Storey, Jody Ryall, Janice Singer, Del Myers, Li-Te Cheng, Michael Muller, "How Software Developers Use Tagging to Support Reminding and Refinding," IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, vol. 35, no. 4, pp. 470-483, July/August, 2009.
 
 
BibTex
x
 
@article{ 10.1109/TSE.2009.15,
author = {Margaret-Anne Storey and Jody Ryall and Janice Singer and Del Myers and Li-Te Cheng and Michael Muller},
title = {How Software Developers Use Tagging to Support Reminding and Refinding},
journal ={IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering},
volume = {35},
number = {4},
issn = {0098-5589},
year = {2009},
pages = {470-483},
doi = {http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/TSE.2009.15},
publisher = {IEEE Computer Society},
address = {Los Alamitos, CA, USA},
}
 
 
RefWorks Procite/RefMan/Endnote
x 
 
TY - JOUR
JO - IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
TI - How Software Developers Use Tagging to Support Reminding and Refinding
IS - 4
SN - 0098-5589
SP470
EP483
EPD - 470-483
A1 - Margaret-Anne Storey,
A1 - Jody Ryall,
A1 - Janice Singer,
A1 - Del Myers,
A1 - Li-Te Cheng,
A1 - Michael Muller,
PY - 2009
KW - Annotations
KW - software navigation
KW - software tagging
KW - tags
KW - software development tools.
VL - 35
JA - IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
ER -
 
Margaret-Anne Storey, University of Victoria, Victoria
Jody Ryall, University of Victoria, Victoria
Janice Singer, National Research Council Canada, Ottawa
Del Myers, University of Victoria, Victoria
Li-Te Cheng, IBM Research, Cambridge
Michael Muller, IBM Research, Cambridge
Developers frequently add annotations to source code to help them remember pertinent information and mark locations of interest for future investigation. Finding and refinding these notes is a form of navigation that is integral to software maintenance. Although there is some tool support in modern development environments for authoring and navigating these comments, we have observed that these annotations often fail to remind and are sometimes difficult to find by the programmer. To address these shortcomings, we have designed a new approach for software navigation called Tags for Software Engineering Activities (TagSEA). TagSEA combines the notion of waypointing (a mechanism for marking locations in spatial navigation) with social tagging to support programmers in defining semantically rich annotations to source code comments. The tool provides support for creating, editing, navigating, and managing these annotations. We present the results from two empirical studies, where we observed and then analyzed how professional programmers used source code annotations to support their development activities over 24 months. Our findings indicate that the addition of semantic information to annotations can improve their value. We also provide suggestions on how annotation tools in general may be improved.

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Index Terms:
Annotations, software navigation, software tagging, tags, software development tools.
Citation:
Margaret-Anne Storey, Jody Ryall, Janice Singer, Del Myers, Li-Te Cheng, Michael Muller, "How Software Developers Use Tagging to Support Reminding and Refinding," IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, vol. 35, no. 4, pp. 470-483, July-Aug. 2009, doi:10.1109/TSE.2009.15
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