title: "Torta: Generating Mixed-Media GUI and Command-Line App Tutorials Using Operating-System-Wide Activity Tracing"
authors: Alok Mysore and Philip J. Guo
venue: ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST)
year: 2017
links:
- <a href="torta-paper.htm">Blog post</a>

tweet: Torta lets you make programming/sysadmin tutorials by simply demonstrating command-line/GUI actions

abstract: >
  Tutorials are vital for helping people perform complex software-based
  tasks in domains such as programming, data science, system
  administration, and computational research. However, it is tedious to
  create detailed step-by-step tutorials for tasks that span multiple
  interrelated GUI and command-line applications. To address this
  challenge, we created Torta, an end-to-end system that automatically
  generates step-by-step GUI and command-line app tutorials by
  demonstration, provides an editor to trim, organize, and add
  validation criteria to these tutorials, and provides a web-based
  viewer that can validate step-level progress and automatically run
  certain steps. The core technical insight that underpins Torta is that
  combining operating-system-wide activity tracing and screencast
  recording makes it easier to generate mixed-media (text+video)
  tutorials that span multiple GUI and command-line apps. An exploratory
  study on 10 computer science teaching assistants (TAs) found that they
  all preferred the experience and results of using Torta to record
  programming and sysadmin tutorials relevant to classes they teach
  rather than manually writing tutorials. A follow-up study on 6
  students found that they all preferred following the Torta tutorials
  created by those TAs over the manually-written versions.

bibtex: >
  @inproceedings{MysoreUIST2017,
   author = {Mysore, Alok and Guo, Philip J.},
   title = {Torta: Generating Mixed-Media GUI and Command-Line App Tutorials Using Operating-System-Wide Activity Tracing},
   booktitle = {Proceedings of the 30th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology},
   series = {UIST '17},
   year = {2017},
   isbn = {978-1-4503-4981-9},
   location = {Qu\&\#233;bec City, QC, Canada},
   pages = {703--714},
   numpages = {12},
   url = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/3126594.3126628},
   doi = {10.1145/3126594.3126628},
   acmid = {3126628},
   publisher = {ACM},
   address = {New York, NY, USA},
   keywords = {mixed-media tutorials, software tutorials, tutorial generation},
  }