Enhancing Programming Interface to Effectively Meet Multiple Information Needs of Developers

TL;DR

This paper discusses the challenges of current IDEs in supporting developers' multiple information needs and proposes high-level design considerations and enhancements to reduce context switching and improve productivity.

Contribution

It introduces new design considerations and potential enhancements for IDEs to better support multitasking and information access, addressing current workflow disruptions.

Findings

Identifies key challenges in IDEs related to context switching.

Proposes high-level design strategies for next-generation IDEs.

Highlights potential improvements to developer productivity.

Abstract

In the past decades, integrated development environments (IDEs) have been largely advanced to facilitate common software engineering tasks. Yet, with growing information needs driven by increasing complexity in developing modern high-quality software, developers often need to switch among multiple user interfaces, even across different applications, in their development process, which breaks their mental workflow thus tends to adversely affect their working efficiency and productivity. This position paper discusses challenges faced by current IDE designs mainly from working context transitions of developers during the process of seeking multiple information needs for their development tasks. It remarks the primary blockades behind and initially explores some high-level design considerations for overcoming such challenges in the next-generation IDEs. Specifically, a few design enhancements on top of modern IDEs are envisioned, attempting to reduce the overheads of frequent context switching commonly seen in the multitasking of developers.