Programmer Stories, Stories for Programmers: Exploring Storytelling in Software Development
Wuilmart, Paul ; Söderberg, Emma LU
and Höst, Martin
LU
(2023)
The 9th Edition of the Programming Experience Workshop
p.68-75
- Abstract
- Developers need to comprehend new code on a regular basis; a demanding task that gets complicated as projects grow in complexity and size. To help developers, documentation is typically added in the form of code comments, design documents, system documents, to name a few examples. Despite all these different kinds of documentation code base comprehension is still challenging and there is room for further exploration of assistance in this space.
In this paper, we explore storytelling as a strategy to assist developers in comprehending a code base, by exploring attachment of stories to developer tasks. We carry out an exploratory study using a design science based research structure with three iterations with feedback from four... (More) - Developers need to comprehend new code on a regular basis; a demanding task that gets complicated as projects grow in complexity and size. To help developers, documentation is typically added in the form of code comments, design documents, system documents, to name a few examples. Despite all these different kinds of documentation code base comprehension is still challenging and there is room for further exploration of assistance in this space.
In this paper, we explore storytelling as a strategy to assist developers in comprehending a code base, by exploring attachment of stories to developer tasks. We carry out an exploratory study using a design science based research structure with three iterations with feedback from four practitioners working at a consultancy company. We find that our participants typically miss information about rationale and alternatives explored in the documentation, and resort to getting this information from other developers. When asked to write their own stories for tasks our participants sought to add this missing information, but overall found story-writing challenging. We further saw that stories on task-level presents challenges connected to exposure of personal information and integration. We make recommendations for future designs in this space based on our results and list a couple of interesting directions for future work. (Less)
Please use this url to cite or link to this publication:
https://lup.lub.lu.se/record/3647e684-5448-4300-ae5d-b2a78e406532
- author
- Wuilmart, Paul
; Söderberg, Emma
LU
and Höst, Martin
LU
- organization
- publishing date
- 2023
- type
- Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding
- publication status
- published
- subject
- host publication
- Companion Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on the Art, Science, and Engineering of Programming
- pages
- 68 - 75
- publisher
- Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
- conference name
- The 9th Edition of the Programming Experience Workshop
- conference location
- Tokyo, Japan
- conference dates
- 2023-03-14 - 2023-03-17
- external identifiers
-
- scopus:85176102222
- ISBN
- 979-8-4007-0755-1
- DOI
- 10.1145/3594671.3594677
- language
- English
- LU publication?
- yes
- id
- 3647e684-5448-4300-ae5d-b2a78e406532
- date added to LUP
- 2023-02-10 20:01:54
- date last changed
- 2023-11-23 11:51:01
@inproceedings{3647e684-5448-4300-ae5d-b2a78e406532,
abstract = {{Developers need to comprehend new code on a regular basis; a demanding task that gets complicated as projects grow in complexity and size. To help developers, documentation is typically added in the form of code comments, design documents, system documents, to name a few examples. Despite all these different kinds of documentation code base comprehension is still challenging and there is room for further exploration of assistance in this space.<br/><br/>In this paper, we explore storytelling as a strategy to assist developers in comprehending a code base, by exploring attachment of stories to developer tasks. We carry out an exploratory study using a design science based research structure with three iterations with feedback from four practitioners working at a consultancy company. We find that our participants typically miss information about rationale and alternatives explored in the documentation, and resort to getting this information from other developers. When asked to write their own stories for tasks our participants sought to add this missing information, but overall found story-writing challenging. We further saw that stories on task-level presents challenges connected to exposure of personal information and integration. We make recommendations for future designs in this space based on our results and list a couple of interesting directions for future work.}},
author = {{Wuilmart, Paul and Söderberg, Emma and Höst, Martin}},
booktitle = {{Companion Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on the Art, Science, and Engineering of Programming}},
isbn = {{979-8-4007-0755-1}},
language = {{eng}},
pages = {{68--75}},
publisher = {{Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)}},
title = {{Programmer Stories, Stories for Programmers: Exploring Storytelling in Software Development}},
url = {{http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3594671.3594677}},
doi = {{10.1145/3594671.3594677}},
year = {{2023}},
}