An Annotation Scheme to Support Analysis of Programming Activities

This paper describes a framework for partitioning programming sessions – including coding, browsing, thinking, reading, testing, etc. – in programming episodes of five seconds’ to a few minutes’ duration. It is based on interpreting excerpts of a session via annotating activity types, properties, triggering events, and focus of attention. The set of predefined activities is grounded on about three hours of actually observed episodes. The level of abstraction is well above single keystrokes but below what is usually called programming cycle, i.e. phases of changing and testing code. The concepts of the framework are described using real world examples. The annotation scheme has been developed to aid in detecting behavioural patterns, especially for analysing defect injection episodes.