According to the aging society, it is getting more important for software industry to secure human resources including senior developers. To enhance the performance of senior developers, we should clarify the strengths and weaknesses of senior developers, and based on that, we should reconsider software engineering education and development support tools. To a greater or lesser extent, many cognitive abilities would be affected by aging, and we focus on the human memory as one of such abilities. We performed preliminary analysis based on the assumption. In the preliminary experiment, we prepared programs in which the influence of human memory performance (i.e., the number of variables remembered in the short-term memory) on reading speed is different, and measured time for subjects to understand the programs. As a result, we observed that the code reading speed of senior subjects was slow, when they read programs in which the influence of human memory performance is larger.
Although many software engineering studies have been conducted, it is not clear whether they meet the needs of software development practitioners. Some studies evaluated the effectiveness of software engineering research by practitioners, to clarify the research satisfies the needs of the practitioners. We performed replicated study of them, recruiting practitioners who mainly belong to SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises) to the survey. We asked 16 practitioners to evaluate cuttingedge software engineering studies presented in ICSE 2016. In the survey, we set the viewpoint of the evaluation as the effectiveness for the respondent's own work. As a result, the ratio of positive answers (i.e., the answers were greater than 2 on a 5-point scale) was 33.3%, and the ratio was lower than past studies. The result was not affected by the number of employees in the respondent's company, but would be affected by the viewpoint of the evaluation.
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