Good documentation offers the promise of enabling developers to easily understand design decisions. Unfortunately, in practice, design documents are often rarely updated, becoming inaccurate, incomplete, and untrustworthy. A better solution is to enable developers to write down design rules which are checked against code for consistency. But existing rule checkers require learning specialized query languages or program analysis frameworks, creating a barrier to writing project-specific rules. We introduce two new techniques for authoring design rules: snippet-based authoring and semi-natural-language authoring. In snippet-based authoring, developers specify characteristics of elements to match by writing partial code snippets. In semi-natural language authoring, a textual representation offers a representation for understanding design rules and resolving ambiguities. We implemented these approaches in RulePad. To evaluate RulePad, we conducted a between-subjects study with 14 participants comparing RulePad to the PMD Designer, a utility for writing rules in a popular rule checker. We found that those with RulePad were able to successfully author 13 times more query elements in significantly less time and reported being significantly more willing to use RulePad in their everyday work.
Fri 13 NovDisplayed time zone: (UTC) Coordinated Universal Time change
01:30 - 02:00 | DocumentationResearch Papers / Visions and Reflections / Paper Presentations / Journal First / Tool Demos at Virtual room 1 | ||
01:30 2mTalk | Beyond Accuracy: Assessing Software Documentation Quality Visions and Reflections Christoph Treude University of Adelaide, Australia, Justin Middleton North Carolina State University, USA, Thushari Atapattu The University of Adelaide DOI | ||
01:33 1mTalk | Contextual Documentation Referencing on Stack Overflow Journal First Sebastian Baltes QAware GmbH and The University of Adelaide, Christoph Treude University of Adelaide, Australia, Martin P. Robillard McGill University Pre-print | ||
01:35 1mTalk | DeepCommenter: A Deep Code Comment Generation Tool with Hybrid Lexical and Syntactical Information Tool Demos Boao Li Zhejiang University, China, Meng Yan Chongqing University, Xin Xia Monash University, Xing Hu Peking University, Ge Li Peking University, David Lo Singapore Management University DOI | ||
01:37 1mTalk | Docable: Evaluating the Executability of Software Tutorials Research Papers Samim Mirhosseini North Carolina State University, USA, Chris Parnin North Carolina State University, USA DOI Pre-print | ||
01:39 1mTalk | RulePad: Interactive Authoring of Checkable Design Rules Research Papers Sahar Mehrpour George Mason University, USA, Thomas LaToza George Mason University, USA, Hamed Sarvari George Mason University, USA DOI Pre-print | ||
01:41 1mTalk | Software Documentation and Augmented Reality: Love or Arranged Marriage? Visions and Reflections Sridhar Chimalakonda Indian Institute of Technology Tirupati, Akhila Sri Manasa Venigalla IIT Tirupati, India DOI | ||
01:43 17mTalk | Conversations on Documentation Paper Presentations Akhila Sri Manasa Venigalla , Christoph Treude University of Adelaide, Australia, Sahar Mehrpour George Mason University, USA, Samim Mirhosseini North Carolina State University, USA, Sridhar Chimalakonda Indian Institute of Technology Tirupati, M: Venera Arnaoudova Washington State University | ||