Francesmary Modugno
Brad A. Myers
Abstract
An open question in the area of Programming by Demonstration (PBD) is how to best represent the inferred program. Without a way to view, edit, and share programs, PBD systems will never reach their full potential. We designed and implemented two graphical representation languages for a PBD desktop similar to the Apple Macintosh Finder. Although a user study showed that both languages enabled nonprogrammers to generate and comprehend programs, the study also revealed that the language that more closely reflected the desktop domain doubled users' abilities to accurately generate programs. Trends suggest that the same language was easier for users to comprehend. These findings suggest that it is possible for a PBD system to enable nonprogrammers to construct programs and that the form of the representation can impact the PBD system's effectiveness. A paper-and-pencil evaluation of the two versions of the PBD desktop prior to the study supported these finding and provided interesting feedback on the interaction between usability evaluations and user studies. In particular, the comparison of the paper-and-pencil evaluation with the empirical evaluation suggested that nonempirical evaluation techniques can provide guidance into how to interpret empirical data and, in particular, that PBD systems need to provide support for programming-strategy selection in order to be successful.
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Index Terms
- Graphical representation of programs in a demonstrational visual shell—an empirical evaluation
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Reviews
Hans J. Schneider
The purpose of this study was to see whether nonprogrammers would be able to generate and comprehend programs in a demonstrational visual shell. To construct a shell program using this system, the user executes concrete actions on actual data objects, and the system infers a general procedure. In designing Pursuit, a programming-by-demonstration system, the authors explored two equivalent program representation languages. The first language employs a comic-strip metaphor, and the second uses keywords for control constructs and for operations. The authors introduce these languages in s ection 2 by giving typical shell programs, such as a program to copy all files edited today and compress them. In the next section, they briefly review related work. Section 4 presents the details of the empirical evaluation. The study consisted of three parts: a tutorial introduction, construction of programs, and assessment of users' comprehension of the program representations. In generating programs, the comic-strip group was twice as successful as the keyword group. (In the text-based group, no user correctly solved the task that had a loop and a branch.) The test of comprehension was divided into asking for the right program, fixing a bug, and modifying a program. The only significant difference was in identifying the right solution to a problem: here the text-based group needed 25 percent less time to find the answer. A detailed discussion completes the paper. It includes some informal results gathered using questionnaires and a comparison with a previous pencil-and-paper evaluation. The paper is well written, self-contained, and easy to read. I recommend it to a general computer science audience as well as to experts in this field.
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