Contextualizing Inferred Programming Difficulties

Communicating automatically inferred programming difficulty to appropriate observers can promote help if they have enough context to determine whether they should and can offer help. Buffered workspace awareness keeps a segment of the developer's actions around an inferred difficulty as context, and allows the recording to be played a single or multiple times. Semi-structured interviews with mentor-intern pairs in a large company showed that they liked the general idea of buffered workspace awareness. We performed a two-phase user study where observers used both single- and multi-pass awareness to determine the problems developers' had and the solution to those problems. Almost all solutions required a one-line fix. We could find no statistical difference in the correctness of their solutions in the two conditions, though the observers overwhelmingly preferred and were more confident using the multi-pass mechanism, and made use of its rewind and pause commands. Both kinds of mechanisms allowed the observers to solve the majority of problems by looking only at 5 minutes of the workers' interaction before the difficulty. The time spent by them processing the context was a small fraction of the time spent by the developers on the difficulties. The time wasted on abandoned difficulties was a small fraction of the time spent on difficulties.