Unakite: Scaffolding Developers’ Decision-Making Using the Web

Developers spend a significant portion of their time searching for solutions and methods online. While numerous tools have been developed to support this exploratory process, in many cases the answers to developers’ questions involve trade-offs among multiple valid options and not just a single solution. Through interviews, we discovered that developers express a desire for help with decision-making and understanding trade-offs. Through an analysis of Stack Overflow posts, we observed that many answers describe such trade-offs. These findings suggest that tools designed to help a developer capture information and make decisions about trade-offs can provide crucial benefits for both the developers and others who want to understand their design rationale. In this work, we probe this hypothesis with a prototype system named Unakite that captures, organizes, and keeps track of information about trade-offs and builds a comparison table, which can be saved for later as the design rationale. Our evaluation results show that Unakite reduces the cost of collecting tradeoff-related information by 45%, and that the resulting comparison table speeds up a subsequent developer’s ability to understand the trade-offs by about a factor of 3.