IDEvelopAR: A Programming Interface to enhance Code Understanding in Augmented Reality

During software maintenance developers spend a considerable amount of time on tasks like navigating, identifying required code locations or tracing various call hierarchies. The classical tabbed interfaces, as found in modern IDEs, are not ideal for such tasks, leading to an inefficient workflow containing many context switches. Therefore, several programming environments, like Code Bubbles, were proposed to overcome these issues by allowing users to freely arrange code fragments on a canvas to make relations more explicit and better understand the codebase. Relations are made explicit using visual links or extra space between groups of code fragments. As a consequence, these approach quickly run out of screen space. In this paper, we present IDEVELOPAR, a tool to enhance code understanding in augmented reality. Due to the use of AR, a user is not restricted anymore by limited display sizes and can use the entire physical space as a workspace for placing and grouping code fragments as well as making changes to the codebase. First, we introduce the views and interactive functionalities of our tool. Next, we illustrate the usefulness of the tool by navigating an example program to locate and fix a bug. Finally, we briefly discuss the results of a cognitive walk-through using the cognitive dimension framework as well as a formative user study to identify potential usability problems. Moreover, in this study the participants also mentioned several advantages of our approach over the classical one. Furthermore, we found that over time the participants developed their own placement strategies.