Abstract:
Decision-making and strategy choice during software development are influenced
by many factors, from the technologies we use to our own personal qualities. Better
understanding these factors may help enable better understanding how and when
development tools help developers. The goal of this thesis was to identify the relationship
between contextual factors and the strategy selections that determine how developers
approach problems. The factors that were examined were programming task, code
scenario, and affect (mood). Task is the actual development task, such as debugging,
implementing, or testing. Code scenario is a way to describe the type of code; our survey
examines three scenarios: self-written code, framework code, and code containing
callbacks. Affect describes psychological mood; it can be activated or deactivated
(arousal), as well as positive or negative (valence). Our findings show that all three
factors influenced the strategies participants chose. Participants with a highly positive
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affect were over twice as likely to ask for help. Participants were twice as likely to use
developer tools for a debugging task, as in an implementation task. Participants rarely
wished to create diagrams when dealing with framework code, as compared to their own
code. These findings deepen our understanding of developer strategy choice; these
insights can be used to improve recommendation systems, IDE’s, and other developer
tools not only by improving the recommendations and content itself, but also by gaining
more insight about when a developer might use those systems.
