Software Journeys

Abstract

Getting familiar with the code is a challenging activity and therefore resource intensive. The larger the software code base, the larger the resource expenditure. We consider software development in the case of established software developed by mid to large mature teams. This thesis explores a new way of documenting code that could increase the productivity of software development. The method consists of creating small, dynamically-ordered sets of code locations called Landmarks. These sets called Journeys are significant for a feature. The landmarks contain documentation related to system behavior and qualitative system state information at the time when the software execution reaches the locations. This new type of documentation is very light and does not require extensive additional software systems for management. This information is stored, and shared in a seamless manner via the existing source control systems. An experiment was performed to gauge the efficiency of this method versus the current development practice. The difference of productivity between developers not using this approach versus developers benefiting from this approach was captured. The results could be qualitatively interpreted as pointing towards an overall increase of productivity for the participant developers using the new approach.