On the Comprehension of Program Comprehension

Abstract

Research in program comprehension has evolved considerably over the past decades. However, only little is known about how developers practice program comprehension in their daily work. This article reports on qualitative and quantitative research to comprehend the strategies, tools, and knowledge used for program comprehension. We observed 28 professional developers, focusing on their comprehension behavior, strategies followed, and tools used. In an online survey with 1,477 respondents, we analyzed the importance of certain types of knowledge for comprehension and where developers typically access and share this knowledge. We found that developers follow pragmatic comprehension strategies depending on context. They try to avoid comprehension whenever possible and often put themselves in the role of users by inspecting graphical interfaces. Participants confirmed that standards, experience, and personal communication facilitate comprehension. The team size, its distribution, and open-source experience influence their knowledge sharing and access behavior. While face-to-face communication is preferred for accessing knowledge, knowledge is frequently shared in informal comments. Our results reveal a gap between research and practice, as we did not observe any use of comprehension tools and developers seem to be unaware of them. Overall, our findings call for reconsidering the research agendas towards context-aware tool support.

An Observational Study of How Experienced Programmers Annotate Program Code

“…This is similar to what other research has shown for when programmers read code [1,2,4]. Our participants used a range of strategies to mark specific sections of code (such as highlights and margin bars) and also cross-reference marks to indicate connections between code on different pages.…”

“…Therefore the reader may take false routes to find what they need, sometimes even backtracking to revis it previously scanned code [4]. While annotations cannot help find unvisited code they can help reduce the clutter of backwards navigation.…”

A Holistic Overview of Software Engineering Research Strategies

“…A recent example is a survey on knowledge needs for program comprehension [40], which was implemented using an online survey tool. The survey consisted of 19 fixed-choice questions, and took (according to the authors) "about 15 minutes" to complete.…”

Exploring Code Projections as a Tool for Concern Management

“…These are generally considered as helpful in the process of code comprehension (e.g, as reported by Kosar et al [1] or Storey [3]). However, as Maalej et al observed, many of such IDE tools are left undiscovered even by professional programmers [2], and, similarly to Damevski et al [4], they call for context-aware tools in development environments.…”

“…Many researchers point out that this process tends to take up to a half of programmers' time during their work with the source code [1,2,3]. The main source of hindrance programmers face during this process lies within the wide semantic gap that is created between the problem domain and the solution domain.…”