Decoding Confusing Code: Social Representations among Developers

Mello, Rafael de; Costa, Jose Aldo da; Oliveira, Benedito; Ribeiro, Márcio; Fonseca, Baldoíno; Gheyi, Rohit; Garcia, Alessandro; Tiengo, Willy

doi:10.1109/chase52884.2021.00010

Cited by 4 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 35 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Although we could not find previous work investigating social representations of Harmful Code, we found other studies characterizes social representations of developers: Mello et al [7] investigated the social representations of confusing code among two distinct communities of software developers from industry. They conducted free association task with the developers to characterize their minds about confusing code.…”

Section: Related Workcontrasting

confidence: 70%

“…The theory of social representations has been applied to support research in diverse fields, including health [9], social development [10], education [8], and psychology [3]. Recent works have applied the theory of social representations in the context of Software Engineering, in particular, using code smells [5,6] and confusing code [7] as social objects. In this study, our social object is the concept of Harmful Code.…”

Section: Theory Of Social Representationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The first experiences with the theory of social representations in software engineering are recent [5][6][7]. However, this theory has been successfully used in different research fields [3,[8][9][10].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Investigating the Social Representations of Harmful Code

Lima

Souza

Fonseca

et al. 2023

Preprint

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Context. Harmful Code are code elements that harm the software. Several characteristics can cause a code be Harmful to the Software. That may result from plenty of characteristics of the source code and external issues. By example, one might associate Harmful Code with the introduction of bugs, architecture degradation, and hard comprehension. However, there is still a lack of knowledge on which are the code issues that are considered harmful from the perspective of the community of software developers. Goal. In this work, we investigate the social representations of Harmful Code among a community of software developers composed of Brazilian postgraduate students and professionals from the industry. Method. We conducted free association tasks with members from this community for characterizing what comes to their minds when they think about Harmful Code. Then, we compiled a set of associations that compose the social representations of Harmful Code. Results. We found that the investigated community strongly associates Harmful Code with a core set of undesirable characteristics of the source code, such as bugs and different types of smells. Based on these findings, we discussed each of them to try to understand why those characteristics happen. Conclusion. Our study reveals the main characteristics of Harmful Code by a community of developers, those characteristics can guide researchers on future works to better understand Harmful Code.

show abstract

Section: Related Workcontrasting

confidence: 70%

Section: Theory Of Social Representationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Investigating the Social Representations of Harmful Code

Lima

Souza

Fonseca

et al. 2023

Preprint

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In this context, the lack of modularization and the lack of standards may be considered a headache for software developers, once they require extra effort from developers to reach a proper comprehension. In recent work, it was found that developers from different Brazilian companies strongly associated the lack of modularization with confusing code (4).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The theory of social representations has been applied to support research in diverse fields, including health (19), social development (17), education (27), and psychology (26). Recent works have applied the theory of social representations to investigate some social objects of Software Engineering, including the identification of code smells (9; 8) and confusing code (4).…”

Section: Theory Of Social Representationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Investigating the Social Representations of Harmful Code

Lima,

Souza,

Fonseca

et al. 2024

JSERD

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Context. Harmful Code denotes code snippets that harm the software quality. Several characteristics can cause this, from characteristics of the source code to external issues. By example, one might associate Harmful Code with the introduction of bugs, architecture degradation, and code that is hard to comprehend. However, there is still a lack of knowledge on which code issues are considered harmful from the perspective of the software developers community. Goal. In this work, we investigate the social representations of Harmful Code among a community of software developers composed of Brazilian postgraduate students and professionals from the industry. Method. We conducted free association tasks with members from this community for characterizing what comes to their minds when they think about Harmful Code. Then, we compiled a set of associations that compose the social representations of Harmful Code. Results. We found that the investigated community strongly associates Harmful Code with a core set of undesirable characteristics of the source code, such as bugs and different types of smells. Based on these findings, we discuss each one of them to try to understand why those characteristics happen. Conclusion. Our study reveals the main characteristics of Harmful Code by a community of developers. Those characteristics can guide researchers on future works to better understand Harmful Code.

show abstract