A study of visual studio usage in practice

S Amann, S Proksch, S Nadi… - 2016 IEEE 23rd …, 2016 - ieeexplore.ieee.org
2016 IEEE 23rd International Conference on Software Analysis …, 2016ieeexplore.ieee.org
Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) provide a convenient standalone solution that
supports developers during various phases of software development. In order to provide
better support for developers within such IDEs, we need to understand how much time
developers spend using various parts of a given IDE and how often they use available
assistance tools. To infer useful conclusions, such information should be gathered for
different types of IDEs for different languages. In this paper, we instrument the previously …
Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) provide a convenient standalone solution that supports developers during various phases of software development. In order to provide better support for developers within such IDEs, we need to understand how much time developers spend using various parts of a given IDE and how often they use available assistance tools. To infer useful conclusions, such information should be gathered for different types of IDEs for different languages. In this paper, we instrument the previously unexplored Visual Studio IDE and track the interactions of developers at an industry partner's software-development department. As a result, we capture interactions for more than 6300 hours of work time, from between 27 and 84 professional C# developers. Our work reports how much time professional developers spend on activities such as code editing and execution or navigation, as well as how often they use assistance tools provided by the IDE. We compare our findings to those of prior studies involving other IDEs and discuss the implications of the commonalities and differences for research on (integrated) developer-assistance tools.
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