As computing becomes a mainstream discipline embedded in the school curriculum and acts as an enabler for an increasing range of academic disciplines in higher education, the literature on introductory programming is growing. Although there have been several reviews that focus on specific aspects of introductory programming, there has been no broad overview of the literature exploring recent trends across the breadth of introductory programming.This paper is the report of an ITiCSE working group that conducted a systematic review in order to gain an overview of the introductory programming literature. Partitioning the literature into papers addressing the student, teaching, the curriculum, and assessment, we explore trends, highlight advances in knowledge over the past 15 years, and indicate possible directions for future research.

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High module cohesion is often suggested as a desirable property of program modularity. The subjective nature of the definition of cohesion, however, can make it difficult to use in practice. In this paper, we examine the relationship between the data flow in a module and its level of cohesion using aprocessing element frow graph (PFG). Based on these PFG's, we regroup the original seven levels of cohesion into four classifications. Slice projiles are then defined by generating slices for all output variables of a module. A relationship is then shown between these slice profiles and the PFG used to indicate levels of cohesion. It is suggested that these slice profiles can be used to determine more easily the cohesiveness of a module.

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