CHS: Medium: Collaborative Research: Code demography: Addressing information needs at scale for programming interface users and designers

社会正在经历一场数字化转型。生活中越来越多的方面被软件所触及。程序员通常通过以新颖的方式组合已有的软件来编写新软件。这些预先存在的部分称为编程接口，由其他程序员编写，以便重用。然而，编程接口的创建者通常并不足够了解他们的工作如何被其他人使用。用户在决定应该选择哪一组接口以及如何使用它们时经常面临障碍。该项目将进行研究，了解程序员未满足的需求，然后创建新的工具来支持编程接口的设计、比较和使用。对于这项调查，团队将开发一个软件基础设施，自动分析和处理大量在线代码。这项研究将加深我们对编程界面设计者和用户未满足的信息需求的理解，以及这些需求如何反映在社区使用数据中。为了解决未满足的需求，团队将执行迭代设计过程，开发新的工具、交互技术，以及帮助开发人员理解现有代码存储库的大图景的含义。这将有助于在社区中明确而不是隐式地做出紧急软件设计选择，并提高代码质量。这项研究基于一种被称为代码人口统计学的方法：研究大型代码语料库中重复出现的模式。它将应用代码人口统计学来调查：(1)如何在特定上下文中使用编程接口；(2)如何设计和发展一个编程接口；(3)如何在功能相似的多个编程接口中进行评估和选择。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Society is undergoing a digital transformation. More and more aspects of life are touched by software. Programmers often write new software by combining pre-existing pieces of software in novel ways. These pre-existing pieces, called programming interfaces, are written by other programmers, to be reused. However, the creators of programming interfaces often do not know enough about how their work gets used by others. Users often face barriers in deciding which of a set of interfaces they should choose, and how to use them. This project will conduct studies to learn about the unmet needs of programmers and then create novel tools to support the design, comparison, and use of programming interfaces. For this investigation, the team will develop a software infrastructure that automatically analyzes and processes large sets of online code.This research will deepen our understanding of unmet information needs of programming interface designers and users, and how these are reflected in community usage data. To address the unmet needs, the team will perform an iterative design process, developing novel tools, interaction techniques, and implications for helping developers understand the big picture of existing code repositories. This is expected to help make emergent software design choices within a community explicit, rather than implicit, and for improving code quality. The research is based on an approach called code demography: the study of recurring patterns in large code corpora. It will apply code demography to investigate: (1) how to use programming interfaces in a particular context; (2) how to design and evolve a programming interface; and (3) how to assess and select among multiple programming interfaces with similar capabilities.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.