Aspect-Oriented Programming with AspectJ

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Taskscapesa topographical model of task
contextPh.D. Thesis ProposalMik
KerstenSupervisor Gail MurphyCommittee
Gregor Kiczales, Tamara Munzner, Erich
GammaJune 1, 2005
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Systems are complex IDEs surface all of the
complexity Result is information overload
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Existing approaches

• Make systems less complex with better modularity
• Optimists think AOP or MDD could reduce size by
  1/3
• Helps, but not enough
• Focus the relevant structure with multiple views
• Contents of each become overpopulated
• Filters are hard to manage and keep up-to-date
• Make the structure easier to access with queries
• Burden of formulating queries is on the
  programmer
• Each approach focuses on the system structure

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What if we focus on task structure?

• While system complexity continues to grow, the
  complexity of tasks programmers perform is
  limited
• Current tools make system structure explicit
• As a result end up showing too much
• Programmers waste time looking for the subset of
  information relevant to the task at hand
• Why not make the task context explicit, so
  programmers see only what the are working on?

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Thesis statement

• Automatically encoding and displaying task
  context makes programmers more productive
• This presentation discusses
• How to encode it, and operate on the resulting
  model
• How to display it in current IDE views and
  visualizations
• How to measure and study effects on productivity

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Approach

• Making task context explicit
• Model should be easy to display and operate on
• Predictable and transparent to the programmer
• Represent elements, relations, paths, groupings
• Information interaction history
• Selection, edit, command and query events
• Model taskscape
• A map of information relevant to the task
• Relevance is defined by degree of interest
  Furnas 1986
• Function not of structure but of interaction
  history

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Degree of interest
DOI(e) A(e.selections) B(e.edits)
C(e.decay)
public WSIFMessage getOutputs() return
outputs
public WSIFMessage getOutputs()

return verify(outputs)
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Once task context is explicit

• Treat parts of your system as a unit
• Do operations on them
• Work with multiple tasks contexts
• Save and restore
• Union and intersect
• Predict interest of related elements
• API clients
• Overriding methods
• Advice

c
c
d
a
b
b
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Taskscapes

• History
• Event stream
• Taskscape
• Height interest of elements
• Arrangement in plane interest of relations
• Projections

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Implementation Mylar

• Prototype built on Eclipse platform
• Eclipse provides extensible abstractions for
  selections, editing, search, and display
• Interaction history encoding
• Monitors selections, editing, navigation, and
  commands
• Task context display
• Filtering, highlighting, sorting, folding,
  update
• Predicted interest
• Active search and degrees of separation
• Active structure views

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Validation

• Thesis automatically encoding and displaying
  task context makes programmers more productive
• Can it be extracted and surfaced effectively?
• Does it make programmers more productive?
• Need productivity measure
• Higher ratio implies more time working on task
  and less time looking for information needed for
  task
• Less browsing elements and scrolling
• Less search invocation and result selection
• Additional measures
• Quantitative usage data and qualitative feedback

edits
edit ratio
selections
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User studies

• Preliminary study
• 6 senior IBM enterprise app developers used early
  Mylar version
• Used Mylar views more than standard Eclipse
  views, liked it
• Edit ratio improved 15 across, 40 within most
  active programmer
• Big study
• 104 developers signed up so far
• 10 day study periods for baseline, interest, and
  predicted interest
• Statistics collected via taskscapes
• Element handles are obfuscated for privacy
• Answer additional questions about
• Task management work practice
• Predicted interest and active search (measured
  with hit ratio)

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Related work

• Interaction history (implicit interest model)
• App event monitoring Hilbert 1998, Smalltalk
  history navigator VisualWorks
• Query tools (implicit interest model)
• FEAT Robillard 2005, JQuery Janzen 2003,
  automated Ye 2002
• Task management (no mapping to structure)
• UMEA monitors desktop apps Kaptelinin 2003,
  WorkingSpheres discuss task context Gonzales
  2004
• Visualization (limited interest model)
• Focuscontext Furnas 1986, Card 2002, edit
  read wear Hill 1992, wear-based filtering
  DeLine 2005
• Taskscapes
• Tasks and interaction history are first class
• Interest of arbitrary structural elements and
  relations
• Topographical representation, interest
  propagation and prediction

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Contributions

• Primary
• Implicitly encoded, topographical model of task
  context
• Integration of model into IDE views that make
  task context explicit
• Secondary
• Focuscontext visualization of task context
• Mechanism for sharing task context

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Timeline

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Architecture
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