An exploratory study of program comprehension strategies of procedural and object-oriented programmers

Corritore, Cynthia L.; Wiedenbeck, Susan

doi:10.1006/ijhc.2000.0423

Cited by 43 publications

(40 citation statements)

References 34 publications

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“…Corritore and Wiedenbeck [5], [6], [7], Engebretson and Wiedenbeck [11], Mosemann and Wiedenbeck [18], and Wiedenbeck et al [34] carried out many studies to investigate various characteristics of developers involved in program understanding tasks. All these studies share a common methodology.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…First, it involved a more complex task and larger system than most previous multisubject studies of developers. Second, many of the previous studies (e.g., [5], [6], [7], [11], [18], [34]) have relied on analyses that were based on heavily abstracted characterizations of both developer behavior and success level. Although this strategy allowed the investigators to study a higher number of subjects, potentially increasing confidence in the results, it also limited the scope of the results.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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How effective developers investigate source code: an exploratory study

Robillard

Coelho

Murphy

2004

IIEEE Trans. Software Eng.

219

157

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Abstract-Prior to performing a software change task, developers must discover and understand the subset of the system relevant to the task. Since the behavior exhibited by individual developers when investigating a software system is influenced by intuition, experience, and skill, there is often significant variability in developer effectiveness. To understand the factors that contribute to effective program investigation behavior, we conducted a study of five developers performing a change task on a medium-size open source system. We isolated the factors related to effective program investigation behavior by performing a detailed qualitative analysis of the program investigation behavior of successful and unsuccessful developers. We report on these factors as a set of detailed observations, such as evidence of the phenomenon of inattention blindness by developers skimming source code. In general, our results support the intuitive notion that a methodical and structured approach to program investigation is the most effective.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How effective developers investigate source code: an exploratory study

Robillard

Coelho

Murphy

2004

IIEEE Trans. Software Eng.

219

157

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…For example, software engineering researchers have long studied notions of coupling and cohesion [25], modularity, and cross-cutting concerns [9], analyzing the role of technical dependencies in both constraining and facilitating change. Moreover, there are several economic [2] and lifecycle [19] factors that can limit software change, not to mention a variety of cognitive [8] and social [18] challenges in simply understanding complex software systems in order to change them.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A case study of post-deployment user feedback triage

Lee

Ferrari

et al. 2011

Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering

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Many software requirements are identified only after a product is deployed, once users have had a chance to try the software and provide feedback. Unfortunately, addressing such feedback is not always straightforward, even when a team is fully invested in usercentered design. To investigate what constrains a teams evolution decisions, we performed a 6-month field study of a team employing iterative user-centered design methods to the design, deployment and evolution of a web application for a university community. Across interviews with the team, analyses of their bug reports, and further interviews with both users and non-adopters of the application, we found most of the constraints on addressing user feedback emerged from conflicts between users heterogeneous use of information and inflexible assumptions in the team's software architecture derived from earlier user research. These findings highlight the need for new approaches to expressing and validating assumptions from user research as software evolves.

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“…Furthermore, Corritore and Wiedenbeck [1] reported that the object-oriented programmers tend to use a strongly topdown approach to program understanding during the early phase of familiarization with the program but use an increasingly bottom-up approach during the subsequent maintenance tasks. Koenemann and Robertson [20] argued that comprehension activities are mostly top-down in a larger program.…”

Section: A Program Comprehensionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Before performing software maintenance and extension tasks, developers must understand what a program does and how it does [1]. Program comprehension is the activity of understanding how a software system or a part of it works [2].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

JSEA: A Program Comprehension Tool Adopting LDA-based Topic Modeling

Wang¹,

Liu²

2017

ijacsa

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Abstract-Understanding a large number of source code is a big challenge for software development teams in software maintenance process. Using topic models is a promising way to automatically discover feature and structure from textual software assets, and thus support developers comprehending programs on software maintenance. To explore the application of applying topic modeling to software engineering practice, we proposed JSEA (Java Software Engineers Assistant), an interactive program comprehension tool adopting LDA-based topic modeling, to support developers during performing software maintenance tasks. JSEA utilizes essential information automatically generated from Java source code to establish a project overview and to bring search capability for software engineers. The results of our preliminary experimentation suggest the practicality of JSEA.

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An exploratory study of program comprehension strategies of procedural and object-oriented programmers

Cited by 43 publications

References 34 publications

How effective developers investigate source code: an exploratory study

How effective developers investigate source code: an exploratory study

A case study of post-deployment user feedback triage

JSEA: A Program Comprehension Tool Adopting LDA-based Topic Modeling

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