Building and maintaining modern software systems requires developers to perform a variety of tasks that span various tools and information sources. The crosscutting nature of these development tasks requires developers to maintain complex mental models and forces them (a) to manually split their high-level tasks into low-level commands that are supported by the various tools, and (b) to (re)establish their current context in each tool. In this paper we present Devy, a Conversational Developer Assistant (CDA) that enables developers to focus on their high-level development tasks. Devy reduces the number of manual, often complex, low-level commands that developers need to perform, freeing them to focus on their high-level tasks. Specifically, Devy infers high-level intent from developer’s voice commands and combines this with an automatically-generated context model to determine appropriate workflows for invoking lowlevel tool actions; where needed, Devy can also prompt the developer for additional information. Through a mixed methods evaluation with 21 industrial developers, we found that Devy provided an intuitive interface that was able to support many development tasks while helping developers stay focused within their development environment. While industrial developers were largely supportive of the automation Devy enabled, they also provided insights into several other tasks and workflows CDAs could support to enable them to better focus on the important parts of their development tasks.
Fri 1 Jun
11:00 - 12:30: Technical Papers - Software Tools and Environments at J2 room Chair(s): Barbora BuhnovaMasaryk University | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
11:00 - 11:20 Talk | Oszkár SemeráthBudapest University of Technology and Economics, András Szabolcs Nagy, Daniel VarroMcGill University / Budapest University of Technology and Economics | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
11:20 - 11:40 Talk | Shafiul Azam ChowdhuryUniversity of Texas at Arlington, Soumik Mohian, Sidharth Mehra, Siddhant Gawsane, Taylor T JohnsonVanderbilt University, Christoph CsallnerUniversity of Texas at Arlington Pre-print | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
11:40 - 12:00 Talk | Nicholas BradleyUniversity of British Columbia, Thomas FritzUniversity of Zurich, University of British Columbia, Reid HolmesUniversity of British Columbia Pre-print Media Attached | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
12:00 - 12:20 Full-paper | Christopher Mendez, Hema Susmita Padala, Zoe Steine-Hanson, Claudia Hilderbrand, Amber Horvath, Charles Hill, Logan Simpson, Nupoor Patil, Anita SarmaOregon State University, Margaret BurnettOregon State University Pre-print | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
12:20 - 12:30 Talk |