Project idea for the CS519 "Software Evolution for Mobility" class presented on Oct 14th 2013. Presentation time: 5 min

1. PROJECT IDEA PITCH
Presentation type: project idea pitch
Class: CS 519 – Software Evolution for Mobility
Presenter: Sergii Shmarkatiuk
Date: 10/14/2013

2. IDEA
Tracking how TouchDevelop users go
through and complete TouchDevelop
tutorials and helping users by giving
contextually appropriate suggestions
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3. PROBLEM
There is no way to track TouchDevelop
users’ progress on the way to their goal
Therefore, there is no way to automatically
publish changes, infer completed tasks or
summarize published changes
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4. WHY?
Tutorials completion might be considered to be one
of the simplest projects on TouchDevelop platform
 Goal of tracking tutorial progress is both simple and
specific enough to be able to test concept/solution
of tasks inference on the small scale and extend it
to the larger scale in the future
 We need to do similar job for the COPE project –
integrate issue tracking and version control using
automatic inference of completed tasks. And we
haven’t yet addressed this specific problem.
 It will allow us to gather information of how users
modify/evolve their source code in order to achieve
certain goal

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5. HOW?
Detect application of code samples mentioned in
the tutorial
 Analyze basic TouchDevelop code patterns in order
to find typical patterns that might serve as
milestones for tracking users’ progress
 Effectively detect whether users are ‘stuck’ or
experience some problems moving towards the
goal of tutorial completion
 In case user is ‘stuck’, provide code suggestions
(using simple online merging) for the user to help
with tutorial completion

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6. EVALUATION
 Detection
of users’ progress and
successful completion of tutorial
 Analysis of situation when users are
‘stuck’ and whether developed
algorithm detects it properly (or fails to
do that in most cases)
 Evaluation of provided source code
edit suggestions and their helpfulness
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7. ALTERNATIVE APPROACHES
Manual assignment of issue tracking
references
No existing viable approach
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8. APPROACH NOVELTY
To the best of our knowledge, nobody tried
to solve problem of tasks inference by
analyzing source code and its evolution
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