Impressive analysis! This is worth to discuss these findings in an academic venue. Alexandre
On Jun 9, 2016, at 6:56 PM, Tudor Girba <tudor@tudorgirba.com> wrote:
Hi,
Juraj, Andrei and I did a rough analysis collected from 94 computers over the past 7 months. Of these, only 42 recorded more than 9 sessions so we only focused on these. It can be because the rest switched off the data collection in the meantime. We also excluded the computers of the GT team members.
Of these 34 used the dive-in feature. That is, these users used at least one contextual search.
We looked at the event of acting on an element (pressing Enter), and we collected the parent category. Acting on an item indicates that intent of search. There are 35 categories used in total, with 8 being used by 10 people (25% of the studied population) or more. Below you can see also the amount of computers using it:
<spotter-categories-distribution.png>
'Classes'->40 'Implementors'->38 'History'->34 'Menu'->24 'Packages'->23 'Messages'->19 'Catalog Projects'->12 'Instance methods'->10 'Senders'->9 'Pragmas'->6 'References'->5 'Playground named pages'->5 'Playground cached pages'->4 'Help topics'->4 'Examples'->3 'Super instance methods'->3 'Selectors'->3 'ws.stfx.eu'->2 'GitHub Baselines'->2 'Dirty Monticello packages'->2 'Class methods'->2 'Global variables'->1 'All subclasses'->1 'Example Subjects'->1 'Files'->1 'Monticello Repositories'->1 'Metacello Configurations'->1 'Class instance variables'->1 'Items'->1 'Tags'->1 'Help contents'->1 'Monticello Package'->1 'Instance variables'->1 'Productions'->1 'Methods'->1
Also, in this analysis, some of the categories appear also at deeper levels (Senders, Implementors, References, Instance methods).
As expected, Classes and Implementors are on top. Yet, the third is History, and it is also interesting to see that there is a high usage of a search through the World menu elements, but also of the Packages.
We also note that there is quite a long tail, and this seems to confirm the hypothesis that different people have different needs and that these differences should be supported by the IDE.
This analysis was carried out using the code that Juraj and Andrei put together for analyzing the data from the event recorder.
Cheers, Doru
-- www.tudorgirba.com www.feenk.com
"Value is always contextual."
-- _,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;: Alexandre Bergel http://www.bergel.eu ^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;.