Mylar

TLDR

Programmers spend more time navigating code than working on it because code cannot be fully modularized for all tasks over its lifetime. The authors present Mylar, a tool that encodes a degree‑of‑interest model of program elements by monitoring programmer activity and displays it in Java and AspectJ views. A preliminary diary study with professional programmers on enterprise‑scale Java systems demonstrated that Mylar was used in daily work.

Abstract

Even when working on a well-modularized software system, programmers tend to spend more time navigating the code than working with it. This phenomenon arises because it is impossible to modularize the code for all tasks that occur over the lifetime of a system. We describe the use of a degree-of-interest (DOI) model to capture the task context of program elements scattered across a code base. The Mylar tool that we built encodes the DOI of program elements by monitoring the programmer's activity, and displays the encoded DOI model in views of Java and AspectJ programs. We also present the results of a preliminary diary study in which professional programmers used Mylar for their daily work on enterprise-scale Java systems.