| KEYWORD |
Dear Diary: experimenting with enhanced web development documentation artifacts
keywords DOCUMENTATION, PROGRAMMING, SOFTWARE, WEB, WEB TECHNOLOGIES
Reference persons LUIGI DE RUSSIS, JUAN PABLO SAENZ MORENO
Research Groups DAUIN - GR-10 - Intelligent and Interactive Systems - e-LITE
Thesis type EXPERIMENTAL, RESEARCH
Description Novice programmers generally do not rely on documentation to keep track of the successes and errors they encounter during the development process: how they get working versions of their projects; how to overcome specific mistakes; what resources they consult; and the lessons learned. Consequently, critical aspects of the process development are constantly omitted from the documentation, which becomes useless to themselves or other developers who want to overcome the same problems or develop similar new projects.
Based on these considerations, this thesis will focus on:
* Getting familiar with Dear Diary, a tool we developed that supports non-expert programmers in creating context-dependent documentation artifacts during their development process. It has been implemented as a Visual Code Extension. It can automatically gather technical information from the development environment; and allows developers to enrich that knowledge with comments and notes.
* Based on a preliminary assessment of the tool that has shed light on various usability issues, extend the tool while simplifying the interaction and enhancing usability.
* Design and conduct a several-months user study to assess in the wild, on the one hand, the effectiveness of the usability improvements; and, on the other hand, the usefulness of the tool itself to guide the novices' development process relying on their documentation. Analyze the data of the evaluation to gather new insights.
If satisfactory, the result of the thesis will be released as an open-source project.
Deadline 22/01/2024
PROPONI LA TUA CANDIDATURA