Better backtracking support for programmers

Programmers often need to backtrack while coding, yet there is only limited support for backtracking in modern programming tools. Our study results confirmed the prevalence of backtracking and identified several problems programmers face while backtracking. To mitigate these problems, we are building an IDE plug-in aimed at providing better support for backtracking by combining a selective undo mechanism, novel visualizations, and code change history search features. We envision that this approach will help programmers perform backtracking tasks more easily.