Keyvan Nayyeri

Following our weekly meetings to discuss the papers published in ICSE 2010, today it was my turn again to present another paper entitled Code Bubbles - Rethinking the User Interface Paradigm of Integrated Development Environments. My first presentation was on Software Traceability with Topic Modeling.

Code Bubbles is the name of a prototype IDE designed with the purpose of changing the User Interface design and user experience for Integrated Development Environments. It applies the concept of bubble metaphor to implement the idea of concurrent view of multiple code fragments to improve the productivity, user experience, and attractiveness of IDEs for developers.

This IDE is built using Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) as the frond end User Interface framework and Eclipse as the backend tool, and the front end and back end communicate some call backs, so Code Bubbles works based on the powerful and extensible Eclipse platform.

The Bubbles IDE relies on the concept of bubble metaphor to replace the traditional windows/tab-based user interface for IDEs (e.g. Visual Studio, Eclipse, or Xcode) that don’t allow more than a singular view of a code fragment. With the new approach, you can put multiple bubbles on a big canvas that can open different files or different portions of a single file at the same time to be viewed concurrently by the user.

The authors of the paper have done a set of quantitative and qualitative analysis on the effectiveness of the IDE. Using the quantitative analysis based on 3 projects, 3 test cases, and 3 metrics they show that in most of the cases Code Bubbles IDE performs better than the Eclipse IDE meaning that it lets the developer view more code at the same time with the least number of User Interface operations to be performed. Doing the qualitative analysis with 23 developers with an average of 10 years of experience with industrial Java programming, they get very positive feedback on the relevance of the IDE.

In my opinion this IDE can perform much better than traditional IDEs especially for reviewing and debugging code but it may not be very advantageous for other scenarios especially for writing a new file. Besides, Code Bubbles IDE requires higher-level hardware including multi-core CPUs, graphic cards, and bigger monitors which is basically caused by the use of WPF technology. This is not a very big problem nowadays, though, because such hardware is becoming common.

Although Code Bubbles is designed for scientific experiments, it’s not available for public download, but you’re able to get involved in the Beta program to get your hands on it and help the research team as well. If you’re interested to see the user experience that you get with the Bubbles IDE, you can view this video of a common scenario performed on it.

For me more important than the paper itself was the presentation because I had spent much time in the past few months learning about good presentation skills to revolutionize my presentations and this was the first presentation where I applied my new skills and experiences to deliver a different presentation. It wouldn’t be easy to get much out of my slides since they are designed to complement my talk but you can read the paper to get an idea about the contributions of this paper. Of course, I could enhance my current slides by using images but I didn’t want to spend money on buying images for this small presentation.

I have uploaded my slides here so you can download and view them.