Code Comprehension

Enhancing Mob Programming with Mixed Reality: Matthys's Research on Improving Developer Experience

Master’s thesis submission season is upon us, and, in the SNAIL Team, Matthys is opening it in style with a fascinating topic. Matthys’s research investigates how mixed reality can be leveraged to improve developer experience. Modern software development practices tend to emphasize more and more human interactions over siloed desktop-centered development tasks. Mob programming is such a practice. Mob Programming “is a software development approach where the whole team works on the same thing simultaneously, in the same space, and on the same computer. This extends the concept of pair programming from two people working together to the entire team continuously collaborating on a single computer to deliver a single work item at a time.”

Last updated on Sep 12, 2024 2 min read
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Enhancing Mob Programming with Mixed Reality: Matthys's Research on Improving Developer Experience
A mixed-reality application for code comprehension

Learning to program, and especially understanding it, is a difficult task for newcomers. For this rea- son, aids are provided, such as IDEs, which give them tools to help them avoid syntax and/or semantic errors, depending on the programming languages used. depending on the programming languages used. However, these aids are not always sufficient to understand the written code, and more often than not, they fail to to understand the errors generated and their causes. For this purpose, code comprehension tools are available to help visualize the code. Some advances have even made it possible to use this through virtual reality. That’s why, with the advent of MR, a draft code visualization application has been proposed. This solution, called codeMR, makes it possible to represent code in 3 dimensions following the city’s paradigm, codeCity. To test its viability, an experiment was carried out with 10 people to see if it could a future for understanding code through the mixed reality. The results showed that the solution had the capabilities to help code comprehension. However, improvements to the application are still required to ensure optimal use in this context.

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A mixed-reality application for code comprehension