IDE Interaction Support With Command Recommender Systems

Software developers' knowledge of integrated development environment (IDE) directly impacts on their productivity. IDE command recommender systems aim at identifying and convincingly presenting to software developers functionality that can help them to accomplish their daily tasks, without overloading them with well known or useless information. Command recommendation requires the estimation of both the utility of commands and the acceptance of the user for new command recommendations. In this paper, we focus on how and when such recommendations should be presented. We performed a long-term user study and our results show that IDE command recommendation must be presented with adequate descriptions of the commands and good usage examples. It seems that a higher frequency of recommendation notifications could be useful, but it should not be too intrusive, especially while developers are focusing on more demanding tasks. To improve recommendation acceptance rate, researchers should also focus on context-aware algorithms and tailor command recommendation timing.