Comprehension effort and programming activities

Citations Over TimeTop 10% of 2018 papers

Abstract

Researchers have observed programmers to allocate considerable amount of effort in program comprehension. But, how does program comprehension effort relate with programming activities? We answer this question by conducting an empirical study using the MSR 2018 Mining Challenge Dataset. We quantify programmers' comprehension effort, and investigate the relationship between program comprehension effort and four programming activities: navigating, editing, building projects, and debugging. We observe when programmers are involved in high comprehension effort they navigate and make edits at a significantly slower rate. However, we do not observe any significant differences in programmers' build and debugging behavior, when programmers are involved in high comprehension effort. Our findings suggest that the relationship between program comprehension effort and programming activities is nuanced, as not all programming activities associate with program comprehension effort.

Related Papers

• → Theories, methods and tools in program comprehension: past, present and future(2005)206 cited
• → Comprehending Studies on Program Comprehension(2017)57 cited
• → TIDE: A Generic Debugging Framework — Tool Demonstration —(2005)28 cited
• → Measuring program comprehension(2018)17 cited
• → Comprehension effort and programming activities(2018)7 cited