From Noise to Knowledge: Interactive Summaries for Developer Alerts

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Yetiştiren, Burak, Kang, Hong Jin, Kim, Miryung
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Yetiştiren, Burak
Kang, Hong Jin
Kim, Miryung
author_facet Yetiştiren, Burak
Kang, Hong Jin
Kim, Miryung
contents Programmers using bug-finding tools often review their reported warnings one by one. Based on the insight that identifying recurring themes and relationships can enhance the cognitive process of sensemaking, we propose CLARITY, which supports interpreting tool-generated warnings through interactive inquiry. CLARITY derives summary rules for custom grouping of related warnings with active feedback. As users mark warnings as interesting or uninteresting, CLARITY's rule inference algorithm surfaces common symptoms, highlighting structural similarities in containment, subtyping, invoked methods, accessed fields, and expressions. We demonstrate CLARITY on Infer and SpotBugs warnings across two mature Java projects. In a within-subject user study with 14 participants, users articulated root causes for similar uninteresting warnings faster and with more confidence using CLARITY. We observed significant individual variation in desired grouping, reinforcing the need for customizable sensemaking. Simulation shows that with rule-level feedback, only 11.8 interactions are needed on average to align all inferred rules with a simulated user's labels (vs. 17.8 without). Our evaluation suggests that CLARITY's active learning-based summarization enhances interactive warning sensemaking.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_07169
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle From Noise to Knowledge: Interactive Summaries for Developer Alerts
Yetiştiren, Burak
Kang, Hong Jin
Kim, Miryung
Software Engineering
Programmers using bug-finding tools often review their reported warnings one by one. Based on the insight that identifying recurring themes and relationships can enhance the cognitive process of sensemaking, we propose CLARITY, which supports interpreting tool-generated warnings through interactive inquiry. CLARITY derives summary rules for custom grouping of related warnings with active feedback. As users mark warnings as interesting or uninteresting, CLARITY's rule inference algorithm surfaces common symptoms, highlighting structural similarities in containment, subtyping, invoked methods, accessed fields, and expressions. We demonstrate CLARITY on Infer and SpotBugs warnings across two mature Java projects. In a within-subject user study with 14 participants, users articulated root causes for similar uninteresting warnings faster and with more confidence using CLARITY. We observed significant individual variation in desired grouping, reinforcing the need for customizable sensemaking. Simulation shows that with rule-level feedback, only 11.8 interactions are needed on average to align all inferred rules with a simulated user's labels (vs. 17.8 without). Our evaluation suggests that CLARITY's active learning-based summarization enhances interactive warning sensemaking.
title From Noise to Knowledge: Interactive Summaries for Developer Alerts
topic Software Engineering
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07169