Call for Papers

While at a shallow look IDEs may appear as 'just' empowered text editors, they are composed of a multi-faceted set of UIs that are designed to support various development tasks at hand, like navigation of code entities, program refactoring, and program debugging. The interaction of the developer with the IDE and its UIs generates a continuous stream of events, called interaction data or interaction histories, that provide a unique valuable resource to characterize, from a quantitative point of view, the diverse mechanics of software development.

The intrinsic potential of interaction histories has attracted a lot of interest in the research community. While the pioneering technique can be considered the work of Mylyn by Murphy et al., more recent approaches focused on recording simple events in the IDE. On top of the recorded data, researchers have been investigating how to leverage it to quantify the time spent on programming activities or understanding the mechanics of development. Furthermore, some authors started investigating how biometric data can be leveraged to characterize other perspectives on developers' behavior, e.g., their cognitive effort through the proxy of eye movements, or developers' emotions and feelings during programming.

The workshop is aimed to bring together researcher and practitioners in the area of Software Engineering that are currently studying or are interested to investigate the specific topic of interaction histories as defined above. The domain of interaction histories, and in particular the nature and potential of such data, raises various issues that are of particular interest in the context of MAINT, and that essentially are open problems in the research area (but are not limited to them):

  • How is it possible to perform real time analytics of interaction histories to support the current tasks of developers?
  • How can interaction histories help researchers understand from a quantitative point of view the mechanics of programming in general and of specific tasks like comprehension, navigation, and debugging?
  • How is it possible to capture and analyze micro evolutions of software artifacts based on the systematic and/or non-systematic editing operations in interaction histories?
  • Which biometric data can complement and improve the effectiveness of interaction histories?
  • How is it possible to preserve developer and company privacy when recording interaction histories?
  • How is it possible to capture interaction data that involves other tools programmers use outside the IDE (e.g., the web browser)?
  • How is it possible to abstract and identify high level programming activities from interaction histories?
  • How can interaction histories support and improve approaches like defect prediction?

We believe that the research community can benefit of a specific venue to openly present new ideas to address the open problems above, identify new issues, and foster new collaborations that may result in solid research results and advancements on the state of the art. We solicit the following types of submissions:

  • Research papers (6-8 pages + up to 2 pages of references)
  • Position papers (2-4 pages + 1 page of references)
  • Tool/IDE Plugins/Dataset Showcase (2-4 pages + 1 page of references)

All submissions will go through a rigorous reviewing process in which every valid submission will be reviewed by at least three program committee members. As with SANER 2018, our workshop also follows a full double-blind review process.