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April 25, 2006
Paper: Evaluating a Fisheye View of Source Code
Mikkel R. Jakobsen, Kasper Hornbæk, University of
Copenhagen, Denmark
Describes a fisheye view for supporting programmers’
navigation and understanding based on both syntactic and
sematic relations in programs. The fisheye view signicantly
improves task completion times and satisfaction.
The aim is to support programmers to navigate and understand source code using the fisheye view (described by Furnas in 1981). The solution is giving context information to support programmers focus. Fisheye views provide more relevant information with less interaction.
The solution was implemented in Eclipse. Page up/down and scrolling is kept, and the user can click in the context area to jump. There is a syntactic structure, and the number of interesting lines is changing. Screenshots and more details
A study with 16 participants (9 with the fisheye interface, and 9 with linear interface) showed that the fisheye view was preferred by most, only one of the fisheye participants did not prefer it.
The method is better for locating methods and other information, but it was also confusing when scrolling. It is faster to navigate to methods references in the focus area.
Issues of concern: 12 of 16 participants thinks that the focus area is too small. The scrolling is also a problem. For the next version it will be considered to continuously change context area when scrolling.
Posted by sv2 at April 25, 2006 12:54 PM