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Summary: Questions about Object Structure
during Coding Activities1
Marwan Abi-Antoun
Nariman Ammar
Thomas LaToza
January 2010
CMU-ISR-10-102
School of Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
Department of Computer Science, Wayne State University
Institute for Software Research, Carnegie Mellon University
Abstract
Recent tools have been designed to help developers understand the potential runtime structure of objects in
a system at compile time. Such tools let developers interactively explore diagrams of object structure. But
do developers ask questions about object structure? If so, when?
We conducted a small pilot study of developers working on coding tasks designed to require thinking about
relationships between objects. Developers did indeed ask a number of questions about various types of
relationships such as containment, ownership, object identities and aliasing. Finally, some of our results
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