Enriched Event Streams: A General Dataset For Empirical Studies On In-IDE Activities Of Software Developers

by Sebastian Proksch, Sven Amann, and Sarah Nadi

Abstract:

Developers have been the subject of many empirical studies over the years. To assist developers in their everyday work, an understanding of their activities is necessary, especially how they develop source code. Unfortunately, conducting such studies is very expensive and researchers often resort to studying artifacts after the fact. To pave the road for future empirical studies on developer activities, we built FeedBaG, a general-purpose interaction tracker for Visual Studio that monitors development activities. The observations are stored in enriched event streams that encode a holistic picture of the in-IDE development process. Enriched event streams capture all commands invoked in the IDE with additional context information, such as the test being run or the accompanying fine-grained code edits. We used FeedBaG to collect enriched event streams from 81 developers. Over 1,527 days, we collected more than 11M events that correspond to 15K hours of working time.

Resources

BibTeX

@article {PAN17,
  title = {{Enriched Event Streams: A General Dataset For Empirical Studies On In-IDE Activities Of Software Developers}},
  author = {Proksch, Sebastian and Amann, Sven and Nadi, Sarah},
  journal = {{Proceedings of the 15th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories}},
  series = {MSR},
  year = {2018},
  doi = {10.1145/3196398.3196400},
  url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3196398.3196400},
}