What Will the User Do (Next) in the Tool?

This position paper advocates the importance of analyzing how users interact with tools that aid software development. Answering “What will the user do (next) in the tool?” can help improve not only the tool’s usability but also its underlying technology in a common usage scenario. While a lot of progress has been made in improving the underlying technology for such tools, less effort has been spent on studying how the tools are typically used in practice. We present a summary of our previous, initial study on how (beginner) users interact with the Alloy Analyzer, a tool for automatic analysis of software models written in Alloy, a first-order, declarative language. We extended the analyzer to log (some of) its interactions with the user. We studied the interaction logs collected from several students and identified some opportunities for improving the analyzer, both the performance of analyses and the user interaction. We hope that this paper motivates the Alloy community to improve and use our logging extension and to further study the new interactions logs. We expect that such studies would lead to improving the analyzer for common usage scenarios, benefiting the entire community. More generally, we argue for a broader effort on studying the usage of software-development tools.