PROJECT IDEA PITCH

Presentation type: project idea pitchClass: CS 519 – Software Evolution for Mobility

Presenter: Sergii ShmarkatiukDate: 10/14/2013

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IDEA

Tracking how TouchDevelop users go through and complete TouchDevelop tutorials and helping users by giving contextually appropriate suggestions

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PROBLEM

There is no way to track TouchDevelop users’ progress on the way to their goal

Therefore, there is no way to automatically publish changes, infer completed tasks or

summarize published changes

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WHY? Tutorials completion might be considered to be

one of the simplest projects on TouchDevelop platform

Goal of tracking tutorial progress is both simple and specific enough to be able to test concept/solution of tasks inference on the small scale and extend it to the larger scale in the future

We need to do similar job for the COPE project – integrate issue tracking and version control using automatic inference of completed tasks. And we haven’t yet addressed this specific problem.

It will allow us to gather information of how users modify/evolve their source code in order to achieve certain goal

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HOW?

Detect application of code samples mentioned in the tutorial

Analyze basic TouchDevelop code patterns in order to find typical patterns that might serve as milestones for tracking users’ progress

Effectively detect whether users are ‘stuck’ or experience some problems moving towards the goal of tutorial completion

In case user is ‘stuck’, provide code suggestions (using simple online merging) for the user to help with tutorial completion

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EVALUATION

Detection of users’ progress and successful completion of tutorial

Analysis of situation when users are ‘stuck’ and whether developed algorithm detects it properly (or fails to do that in most cases)

Evaluation of provided source code edit suggestions and their helpfulness

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ALTERNATIVE APPROACHES

Manual assignment of issue tracking references

No existing viable approach

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APPROACH NOVELTY

To the best of our knowledge, nobody tried to solve problem of tasks inference by

analyzing source code and its evolution