Waypointing and social tagging to support program navigation

Abstract

As the "software space" of source code, documentation, models, and other programming artifacts continue to grow in size and complexity, programmers face the challenge of navigating this space, as well as documenting and sharing their journeys for other developers and future successors. Current navigational structures are either closely tied to the semantics of the software or are constructed in a constrained top-down fashion to match the architecture or requirements of the system. In this paper, we introduce the notion of combining waypoints from geographical positioning and social tagging from shared bookmark systems to allow programmers to create shared, tagged points in software space. We report preliminary progress on our prototype (tagSEA), and discuss our future plans.