Mental representations of expert procedural and object-oriented programmers in a software maintenance task

The Role of Cognitive Fit in the Relationship between Software Comprehension and Modification

“…For example, maintenance personnel often successfully modify software without understanding it fully (see, for example, Corritore and Wiedenbeck 1999, Littman et al 1986, Pennington 1987b. Further, given the size of many industrial applications, it seems unlikely that maintenance personnel could devote the time necessary to develop a complete understanding of the entire application in the course of conducting a modification.…”

TAGGINGSENSE: Method Based On Sensemaking For Object-Oriented Source Code Comprehension

“…Studies show that efforts applied on maintenance are mainly targeted to the comprehension part [11].…”

The effect of task order on the maintainability of object-oriented software

“…Program comprehension requires that the maintainer represent the software mentally [15,16]. A number of models have been proposed to describe the cognitive processes by which program comprehension may be achieved.…”

“…Pennington's model) are based on experiences of very small programs or parts of a program with 200 or lines of code or fewer. Corritore and Wiedenbeck describe an empirical study that investigated the mental representations of maintainers when working on software developed by expert procedural and object-oriented programmers [15]. In this study, the program being maintained consisted of about 800 lines of code, and hence was considered to be rather large.…”