What is Communication Design?
| dc.creator | Spinuzzi, Clay | en |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2015-02-03T16:02:21Z | en |
| dc.date.available | 2015-02-03T16:02:21Z | en |
| dc.date.issued | 2012-09-01 | en |
| dc.description | At the time of publication C. Spinuzzi was at the University of Texas at Austin. | en |
| dc.description.abstract | In 1997, I worked with a team to conduct my first qualitative research project, a study of how software developers used code libraries when developing a common codebase (McLellan et al. 1998; Spinuzzi 2001). In particular, I was interested in how developers used inline comments to understand their own and others' code. At two sites, the developers used comments pretty much as you might expect: as notes for interpreting and communicating information about the code. But at the third site, developers essentially ignored the comments. One compared the comments to an approaching car's blinker: it might or might not indicate intent, but you'd be foolish to trust it. Another set his editor to gray out comments so they wouldn't distract him. A third used comments - not to interpret the code, but as landmarks for navigating it. "If I have 50 lines of code without a comment," he told me, "I get lost. It takes me a while to actually read the code and find out what it's doing. But if I have comments I can separate it into sections, and if I know it's the second section in the function, I can go right to it." | en |
| dc.description.department | Writing | en |
| dc.identifier.citation | Communication Design Quarterly Review. Volume 1 Issue 1, September 2012 Pages 8-11 | en |
| dc.identifier.doi | 10.1145/2448917.2448919 | en |
| dc.identifier.issn | 2166-1200 | en |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/2152/28278 | en |
| dc.language.iso | eng | en |
| dc.publisher | Communication Design Quarterly | en |
| dc.subject | Information systems | en |
| dc.subject | Communication network | en |
| dc.subject | Text ecology | en |
| dc.title | What is Communication Design? | en |
| dc.type | Newsletter | en |