Are visual programming languages better? The role of imagery in program comprehension

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

“…Our model allows for all of these possibilities and predicts that the particular strategy chosen depends on the cues provided in the environment. Models of knowledge formation during program understanding [35], [51], which have suggested that a developer's mental model consists of relationships between code elements and the purpose and intent of these elements, are consistent with our description of knowledge as the combination of paths that a developer has traversed in a program over time and their existing knowledge. Finally, because our model describes a pattern of activity that is fundamentally driven by cues offered by the environment and the developers' perceptions of their relevance, it is also consistent with research on the influence of the visual representation of code on program understanding [3], [23], [33], [48].…”

“…For example, studies have shown that developers often determine the statements that could influence a variable (a backward slice) [50] and that automated tools for helping developers determine these statements improve developer success on debugging tasks [20]. 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].…”

Designing for Life

“…User interface solutions are meant to provide people with a realistic possibility of reaching their goals , regardless of users' capacity limitations (Baddeley 2007(Baddeley , 2012 ), comprehension problems (Kitajima and Polson 1995 ), or lack of skills (Green and Petre 1996 ;Navarro-Prieto and Canas 2001 ;Visser and Hoc 1990 ). Th erefore, we focus the design discourse now on the issues how to make technologies easier for people to use Olson and Olson 2003 ;.…”

Understanding Software Architectures by Visualization--An Experiment with Graphical Elements

“…As a result of their experiment they propose properties of a tool for program comprehension that alleviate the usage of such a tool. Another experiment comparing the differences of program understanding in visual and textual program representations is given in [18]. Their findings include that visual and textual representations lead to different mental maps of a program and different information is extracted by participants.…”