Abstract
Communicating automatically inferred programming difficulty to appropriate observers can promote help if they have enough context to determine whether they should and can offer help. Buffered workspace awareness keeps a segment of the developer’s actions around an inferred difficulty as context, and allows the recording to be played a single or multiple times. Semi-structured interviews with mentor-intern pairs in a large company showed that they liked the general idea of buffered workspace awareness. We performed a two-phase user study where observers used both single- and multi-pass awareness to determine the problems developers’ had and the solution to those problems. Almost all solutions required a one-line fix. We could find no statistical difference in the correctness of their solutions in the two conditions, though the observers overwhelmingly preferred and were more confident using the multi-pass mechanism, and made use of its rewind and pause commands. Both kinds of mechanisms allowed the observers to solve the majority of problems by looking only at 5 minutes of the workers’ interaction before the difficulty. The time spent by them processing the context was a small fraction of the time spent by the developers on the difficulties. The time wasted on abandoned difficulties was a small fraction of the time spent on difficulties.