A glimpse of expert programmers' mental imagery

Petre, Marian; Blackwell, Alan F.

doi:10.1145/266399.266409

Cited by 25 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 41 publications

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“…Other studies suggest that developers form mental models of the structure, intent, and relationships in code, which guide their decision making [35], [51]. Some studies found that developers have a quickly degrading memory for such information [1], [17], explaining why developers rely so extensively on external memory sources, such as digital or paper notes and whiteboards [16], [39].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Exploratory Study of How Developers Seek, Relate, and Collect Relevant Information during Software Maintenance Tasks

Myers

Coblenz

et al. 2006

IIEEE Trans. Software Eng.

570

336

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Abstract-Much of software developers' time is spent understanding unfamiliar code. To better understand how developers gain this understanding and how software development environments might be involved, a study was performed in which developers were given an unfamiliar program and asked to work on two debugging tasks and three enhancement tasks for 70 minutes. The study found that developers interleaved three activities. They began by searching for relevant code both manually and using search tools; however, they based their searches on limited and misrepresentative cues in the code, environment, and executing program, often leading to failed searches. When developers found relevant code, they followed its incoming and outgoing dependencies, often returning to it and navigating its other dependencies; while doing so, however, Eclipse's navigational tools caused significant overhead. Developers collected code and other information that they believed would be necessary to edit, duplicate, or otherwise refer to later by encoding it in the interactive state of Eclipse's package explorer, file tabs, and scroll bars. However, developers lost track of relevant code as these interfaces were used for other tasks, and developers were forced to find it again. These issues caused developers to spend, on average, 35 percent of their time performing the mechanics of navigation within and between source files. These observations suggest a new model of program understanding grounded in theories of information foraging and suggest ideas for tools that help developers seek, relate, and collect information in a more effective and explicit manner.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Exploratory Study of How Developers Seek, Relate, and Collect Relevant Information during Software Maintenance Tasks

Myers

Coblenz

et al. 2006

IIEEE Trans. Software Eng.

570

336

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…A previous paper [44] describes a study into the mental imagery of ten individual expert software developers, who were questioned directly regarding the nature of their mental representations while they were engaged in a design task.…”

Section: Study 1: Software Developers' Mental Imagerymentioning

confidence: 99%

Mental imagery and software visualization in high-performance software development teams

Petre

2010

Journal of Visual Languages & Computing

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This paper considers the relationship between mental imagery and software visualization in professional, high performance software development. It presents overviews of four empirical studies of professional software developers in high-performing teams: (1) expert programmers' mental imagery, (2) how experts externalize their mental imagery as part of teamwork, (3) experts' use of commercially available visualization software, and (4) what tools experts build themselves, how they use the tools they build for themselves, and why they build tools for themselves. Through this series of studies, the paper provides insight into a relationship between how experts reason about and imagine solutions, and their use of and requirements for external representations and software visualization. In particular, it provides insight into A c c e p t e d m a n u s c r i p t how experts use visualization in reasoning about software design, and how their requirements for the support of design tasks differ from those for the support of other software development tasks. The paper draws on theory from other disciplines to explicate issues in this area, and it discusses implications for future work in this field.

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“…Elicitation of experts' mental imagery -of the ways they envision and manipulate software designs and programmes in their mindsreveals both that the imagery is rich and varied, and that there are strong commonalities among individuals in terms of the properties of their mental imagery (if not in the entirety of their repertoires) [Petre and Blackwell,29]. Mental imagery is used here to describe any inspectable mental representations, regardless of the sensory modality of the image.…”

Section: Mental Imagery and Software Visualisationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Insights from expert software design practice

Petre

2009

Proceedings of the 7th Joint Meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Found

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Software is a designed artifact. In other design disciplines, such as architecture, there is a well-established tradition of design studies which inform not only the discipline itself but also tool design, processes, and collaborative work. The 'challenge' of this paper is to consider software from such a 'design studies' perspective. This paper will present a series of observations from empirical studies of expert software designers, and will draw on examples from actual professional practice. It will consider what experts' mental imagery, software visualisations, and sketches suggest about software design thinking. It will also discuss some of the deliberate practices experts use to promote innovation. Finally, it will open discussion on the tensions between observed software design practices and received methodology in software engineering.

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A glimpse of expert programmers' mental imagery

Cited by 25 publications

References 41 publications

An Exploratory Study of How Developers Seek, Relate, and Collect Relevant Information during Software Maintenance Tasks

An Exploratory Study of How Developers Seek, Relate, and Collect Relevant Information during Software Maintenance Tasks

Mental imagery and software visualization in high-performance software development teams

Insights from expert software design practice

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