Code bubbles: rethinking the user interface paradigm of integrated development environments

Today’s integrated development environments (IDEs) are hampered by their dependence on files and file-based editing. We propose a novel user interface that is based on collections of lightweight editable fragments, called bubbles, which when grouped together form concurrently visible working sets. In this paper we describe the design of a prototype IDE user interface for Java based on working sets. A quantitative evaluation shows that developers could expect to view a sizeable number of functions concurrently with relatively few UI operations. A qualitative user evaluation with 23 professional developers indicates a high level of excitement, interest, and potential benefits and uses. Categories and Subject Descriptors D.2.6 [Software Engineering]: Programming Environments – integrated environments. General Terms Human Factors Keywords Integrated development environments, concurrent views, working set, source code, bubbles, navigation, debugging, human factors.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: ICSE
• Authors: Andrew Bragdon, Steven P. Reiss, Robert C. Zeleznik, Suman Karumuri, William Cheung, Joshua Kaplan, Christopher Coleman, Ferdi Adeputra, Joseph J. LaViola Jr.
• Keywords: ICSE 2010, Integrated Development Environments, Software Engineering, User Interface, Working Set