Engineering Commons^™

An Empirical Study On The Classification Of Python Language Features Using Eye-Tracking, Jigyasa Chauhan

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Python, currently one of the most popular programming languages, is an object-
oriented language that also provides language feature support for other programming
paradigms, such as functional and procedural. It is not currently understood how
support for multiple paradigms affects the ability of developers to comprehend that
code. Understanding the predominant paradigm in code, and how developers classify
the predominant paradigm, can benefit future research in program comprehension as
the paradigm may factor into how people comprehend that code. Other researchers
may want to look at how the paradigms in the code interact with various code smells.
To investigate how …

Representational Learning Approach For Predicting Developer Expertise Using Eye Movements, Sumeet Maan

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The thesis analyzes an existing eye-tracking dataset collected while software developers were solving bug fixing tasks in an open-source system. The analysis is performed using a representational learning approach namely, Multi-layer Perceptron (MLP). The novel aspect of the analysis is the introduction of a new feature engineering method based on the eye-tracking data. This is then used to predict developer expertise on the data. The dataset used in this thesis is inherently more complex because it is collected in a very dynamic environment i.e., the Eclipse IDE using an eye-tracking plugin, iTrace. Previous work in this area only worked on …

An Eye Tracking Replication Study Of A Randomized Controlled Trial On The Effects Of Embedded Computer Language Switching, Cole Peterson

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The use of multiple programming languages (polyglot programming) during software development is common practice in modern software development. However, not much is known about how the use of these different languages affects developer productivity. The study presented in this thesis replicates a randomized controlled trial that investigates the use of multiple languages in the context of database programming tasks. Participants in our study were given coding tasks written in Java and one of three SQL-like embedded languages: plain SQL in strings, Java methods only, a hybrid embedded language that was more similar to Java. In addition to recording the online …

A Unifying Approach To Behavioral Coverage, Elena Sherman

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Developing methods for validating that a program works as intended is one of the key research areas in software engineering. Ideally a program P must exhibit its expected be- havior, or property, φ on all of its inputs, i.e., P |= φ. The software engineering community has developed various program analysis approaches to assess whether P |= φ. In general, these approaches can be partitioned into dynamic and static program analysis. The former execute P on a particular input and checks that the execution conforms to φ. The latter in- terprets the code of P and check that on all …

Analysis And Transformation Of Pipe-Like Web Mashups For End User Programmers, Kathryn T. Stolee

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Mashups are becoming increasingly popular as end users are able to easily access, manipulate, and compose data from several web sources. To support end users, communities are forming around mashup development environments that facilitate sharing code and knowledge. We have observed, however, that end user mashups tend to suffer from several deficiencies, such as inoperable components or references to invalid data sources, and that those deficiencies are often propagated through the rampant reuse in these end user communities.

In this work, we identify and specify ten code smells indicative of deficiencies we observed in a sample of 8,051 pipe-like web …