TaskBoard: Tracking pertinent task artifacts and plans

Developers must actively maintain status information about the programming tasks they are engaged in. Unfortunately, much of this knowledge does not exist in tangible form. Commonly, developers are forced to recover the details of this knowledge after encountering an unanticipated interruption. In this paper, we present a technique enabling developers to quickly reengage in a task after such an interruption. A dashboard visualization, called TaskBoard, of intermediate task knowledge is constructed from recent activities and program executions and then displayed to assist reengagement. Developers can annotate its contents with task descriptions and prospective cues.