Supporting Program Comprehension in Agile with Links to User Stories

Agile software development involves continuously making iterative and incremental changes to source code. When making changes, developers quickly focus on parts of code that they consider to be important, and sometimes miss other relevant parts. Therefore, tool support is needed to help developers locate conceptually related sections of code. In this paper, we present Zelda, a tool designed to work with Agile practices that captures and maintains links between high-level information and source code. We evaluated Zelda with a pilot study where subjects were required to make a change to a small web application (10 KLOCs). They were given a task description either on paper or in Zelda. We found that the Zelda Group made more accurate changes, were less likely to become disoriented, and were more willing to access additional information.