Empirical evaluation of hypertextual information access from program text

HyperSoft is a hypertext based software maintenance support tool. HyperSoft provides various transient hypertextual access structures (THASs), which are formed automatically on the basis of the situation-dependent information needs of software engineers. THASs highlight the relevant parts of the program and enable nonlinear browsing between them. The system also supports various graphical views whose elements have linked to the program text. We represent the empirical results of the effects of using these hypertextual structures in relation to a set of sample information requests. The results indicate significantly better task performance as compared to using a conventional compiler environment.