New opportunities for extracting insights from cloud based IDEs

Abstract

Traditional integrated development environments (IDEs) provide developers with robust environments for writing, testing, debugging, and deploying code. As the world becomes increasingly networked and more services are delivered via the cloud, it is only natural that the functionality of IDEs be delivered via the cloud. In addition to simplifying the provisioning and deployment of new IDE features, and making it easier to integrate with other web native tools, cloud based IDEs provide some fundamental advantages when it comes to understanding the behavior of a wide community of software developers. One of these advantages for the IDE provider is the ability to transparently monitor and analyze the real-time fine-grained actions of a large number of developers. In this paper, we explore how to leverage these transparent monitoring capabilities of cloud based IDEs to develop advanced analytics to understand developers' behavior and infer their characteristics. We demonstrate the feasibility of this research direction with a preliminary study focusing on the way that source code files grow for different developers, development tasks, and skill levels. We then analyze the trends of source code file growth and find growth is more similar within subjects than within tasks. Copyright © 2014 ACM.