Benjamin Biegel

Turning a Tablet into a Programming Tool Benjamin Biegel

Mobile touch devices are frequently used in everyday life and have become more than just a short-lived trend. They have become ubiquitous and many people all over the world are familiar with new interaction paradigms that are provided by this technology. In software engineering, however, touch devices are only rarely used. This thesis aims to make use of touch user interfaces within the context of software development. As a fundamental step, it proposes an activity taxonomy of developers that is derived from software engineering research spanning over the last forty years. Further, it contributes new insights in understanding developers' work habits that are delivered from a detailed user study examining the largely unexplored strategies developers apply for ordering fields and methods. While this research topic is still at an early stage, this thesis examines in an exploratory manner different approaches that augment typical programming activities with touch gestures. Specifically, it addresses main activities like structuring, navigating, understanding, annotating, and presenting source code, handling the graphical user interface of an IDE, and exploring the dynamic state of a program. In the scope of this work, each of the resulting approaches are introduced, evaluated, and discussed by using a prototypical implementation. In particular, two approaches for presenting source code are applied in programming courses that are regular parts of the computer science curriculum at the University of Trier (Germany). In summary, first user studies and practical experiences gathered in this work suggest that touch user interfaces are well-suited for programming tasks in general and might have the potential for supporting developers in their daily programming activities.