/Design-Pattern-DocUserStudy

Primary LanguageJava

Design-Pattern-DocUserStudy

This repository contains an experimental package for an empirical study conducted to show the benefits and liabilities of documenting pattern instances using an approached based on good practices for software documentation and on liveness principles. The study uses the Design-Pattern-Doc plugin for the IntelliJ IDEA IDE.

  • Task1/- Resources provided to study participants for the first task of the experiment
  • Task2/- Resources provided to study participants for the second task of the experiment
  • Task3/- Resources provided to study participants for the third task of the experiment
  • answers/ - Questionnaire answers given by the participants during the experiment, and later incorporated into the data.csv/data.sav files
  • questionnaire/ - Questionnaire provided to the participants during the experiment. Contains the background questions, the plugin walkthrough (for the experimental group), the task instructions and the assessment questions
  • DesignPatternsReferenceCard.pdf - Reference card used as external documentation by the participants during the experiment.
  • README.md - This file
  • data.csv/data.sav - Data collected during the experiment.

    Note:

    • T{x}Time - The time (in seconds) spent during task x
    • T{x}ED - The number of access to the provided external documentation during task x
    • T{x}ID - The number of access to the internal documentation during task x
    • BG{x} - Numerical representation of the answer to the background question x (eg. Strongly disagree = 1, Strongly agree = 5)
    • Q{x} - Numerical representation of the answer to the question x of the final questionnaire
    • Group - 0 if that data row corresponds to someone from the control group or 1 if it does not
    • TotalTime - The time (in seconds) spent during the entire experiment
  • syntax.sps - The SPSS syntax that can be used to obtain the experiment box-plots and the MW/t-tests
  • pattern_instances.xml - The Design-Pattern-Doc persisted documentation which is used for the experimental group. The plugin generates a new file on the location: "..\.IntelliJIdea{version}\config\options" if it does not find that file on this directory. Should be overrided by the provided file to replicate Task2.