Abstract not found

Text elision is a user interface technique that aims to improve the efficiency of navigating through information by allowing regions of text to be `folded' into and out of the display. Several researchers have argued that elision interfaces are particularly suited to source code editing because they allow programmers to focus on relevant code regions while suppressing the display of irrelevant information. Elision features are now appearing in commercial systems for software development. There is, however, a lack of empirical evidence of the technique's efficiency. This paper presents an empirical evaluation of source code elision using a Java program editor. The evaluation compared a normal `flat text' editor with two versions that diminished elided text to levels that were `just legible' and `illegible'. Performance was recorded in four tasks involving navigation through programs. Results show that programmers were able to complete their tasks more rapidly when using the elision interfaces, particularly in larger program files. Although several participants indicated a preference for the `just legible' elision interface, performance was best with illegible elision.

Most software reuse research has ignored the role of the software engineer. However, software engineers tend to be better reasoners and have more experiences to recall than tool-based reuse mechanisms. This paper argues for integrating software engineers into existing reuse paradigms and providing tool support to assist problem description and component understanding, selection and adaptation. However, empirical studies indicate that these reuse tasks are difficult, even for experienced software engineers. Therefore, guidelines and a high-level architecture for design of tool support are based on reports of behaviour and problems arising during reuse. 1: Introduction Many technical solutions to software reuse problems have failed to result in widespread reuse. One reason may be that these solutions ignore human involvement. This paper investigates specific problems which arise from excluding software developers from the reuse process and proposes solutions based on human involvement fo...