Developers spend significant time reading and navigating code fragments spread across multiple locations. The file-based nature of contemporary IDEs makes it prohibitively difficult to create and maintain a simultaneous view of such fragments. We propose a novel user interface metaphor for code understanding based on collections of lightweight, editable fragments called bubbles, which form concurrently visible working sets. We present the results of a qualitative usability evaluation, and the results of a quantitative study which indicates Code Bubbles significantly improved code understanding time, while reducing navigation interactions over a widely-used IDE, for two controlled tasks.

Today's integrated development environments (IDEs) are hampered by their dependence on files and file-based editing. We propose a novel user interface that is based on collections of lightweight editable fragments, called bubbles, which when grouped together form concurrently visible working sets. In this paper we describe the design of a prototype IDE user interface for Java based on working sets. A quantitative evaluation shows that developers could expect to view a sizeable number of functions concurrently with relatively few UI operations. A qualitative user evaluation with 23 professional developers indicates a high level of excitement, interest, and potential benefits and uses.

Today's integrated development environments (IDEs) are hampered by their dependence on files and file-based editing. We propose a novel user interface that is based on collections of lightweight editable fragments, called bubbles, which when grouped together form concurrently visible working sets. We describe the design of a prototype IDE user interface for Java based on working sets.

Modern systems, particularly servers, involve multiple threads dealing with multiple incoming transactions using either implicit or explicit internal tasks. Understanding the inherently complex behavior of such systems can be quite difficult. We present a framework that offers a visualization of this behavior in system-specific terms in real time. The framework is unique in that it uses a combination of program analyses to minimize the work the user needs to do to construct the visualization.

Complex applications today involve multiple processes, multiple threads of control, distributed processing, thread pools, event handling, messages. The behaviors and misbehaviors of these nondeterministic, message-based systems are difficult to capture and understand. The typical approach is to trace the behavior of the systems and track how the different incoming messages are processed throughout the system. While messages between processes can be captured automatically at the network or library level, tracing the message processing within a system, which is often more complex and error-prone, requires the programmer to manually instrument the code by identifying the different message handlers, thread states, processing stages, and shared queues accurately and completely. In this paper we show how dynamic analysis can be used to automatically identify the transactions, stages and shared queues in Java programs as a prelude to trace-based comprehension.