Continuous Execution: Improving user feedback in the development cycle

The author hereby grants to MIT permission to reproduce and to distribute publicly paper and electronic copies of this thesis document in whole and in part in any medium now known or hereafter created. Abstract Programming environments are increasing the amount of feedback given to users during the development cycle. This work continues with this trend by exploring continuous execution, a programming environment where the result of executing part of a user " s code is outputted as the user writes it. This extra feedback provided to users lets users gain a better understanding of a program " s internals. A prototype implementation is done for Chickenfoot, a JavaScript-based web automation tool. The prototype takes advantage of the web browsing environment of Chickenfoot and uses the browser history to reduce the amount of user code that actually needs to be executed. User testing was done to evaluate the usefulness of continuous execution.