Challenges in Program Comprehension

Tiarks, Rebecca; Röhm, Tobias

doi:10.1007/bf03323460

Cited by 13 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…They use additional standalone tools such as the rudimentary text search tool grep to look for specific words in different artifacts because they do not know all search features of the IDE. What we learned from our case study is, that beside the developers' missing knowledge about IDE capabilities described by [13], current IDEs lack the necessary integration of the different views that need to be co-evolved (requirements, architecture, code) and a uniform representation of the artifacts involved. The only mapping between these views can be done by means of textual matching, often carried out manually.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 97%

“…it the most expensive type of activity in the entire software evolution process. A recent observational study [10] on how professional developers comprehend programs, allowed its authors to identify four recurring challenges, which make program comprehension especially difficult [13]. Three of them have a profound impact on the evolution of both requirements and architecture design.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A case study on co-evolution of software artifacts using integrated views

Küster

Trifu

2012

Proceedings of the WICSA/ECSA 2012 Companion Volume

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When changing software systems, significant effort is spent on locating the architectural elements to be changed, how they relate to the existing and new requirements, and what decisions have led to the current state of the parts of the system to evolve. Model-based approaches have proposed formal metamodels to capture different aspects of the system, e.g. requirements specified in use cases and architectural models for the component design. Existing approaches still lack in an easy-to-use way to combine information from different models. We carried out a case study evolving the CoCoME software observing what are major points for improvement. In this paper, we discuss the results of the case study giving a list of requirements for tools or approaches supporting architecture-centric and model-based software evolution. Finally, we present our graph-based approach for integrated views which can help in overcoming some of the current limitations.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 97%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A case study on co-evolution of software artifacts using integrated views

Küster

Trifu

2012

Proceedings of the WICSA/ECSA 2012 Companion Volume

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…To decide where to set a breakpoint, developers use their observations, recall their experiences with similar debugging tasks and formulate hypotheses about their tasks [14]. Tiarks and Röhms [15] observed that developers have difficulties in finding locations for setting the breakpoints, suggesting that this is a demanding activity and that supporting developers to set appropriate breakpoints could reduce debugging effort.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Swarm debugging: The collective intelligence on interactive debugging

Petrillo

Guéhéneuc

Pimenta

et al. 2019

Journal of Systems and Software

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One of the most important tasks in software maintenance is debugging. To start an interactive debugging session, developers usually set breakpoints in an integrated development environment and navigate through different paths in their debuggers. We started our work by asking what debugging information is useful to share among developers and study two pieces of information: breakpoints (and their locations) and sessions (debugging paths).To answer our question, we introduce the Swarm Debugging concept to frame the sharing of debugging information, the Swarm Debugging Infrastructure (SDI) with which practitioners and researchers can collect and share data about developers' interactive debugging sessions, and the Swarm Debugging Global View (GV) to display debugging paths. Using the SDI, we conducted a large study with professional developers to understand how developers set breakpoints. Using the GV, we also analyzed professional developers in two studies and collected data about their debugging sessions. Our observations and the answers to our research questions suggest that sharing and visualizing debugging data can support debugging activities.

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“…Source code is an essential artefact for software maintainers to become familiar with a software system (Carvalho, 2013;Corley, Kammer, & Kraft, 2012;Cornelissen, Zaidman, Society, & van Deursen, 2011;Sharafi, 2011;Tiarks, Röhm, & Roehm, 2013;Yazdanshenas & Moonen, 2012). Nowadays, the expansion in size and difficulty of software system led to difficulties in maintaining the system.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Semantic Metadata Information (SMI) Visualisation Technique Using the Integration of Ontology and UML Graph-Based Approach to Support Program Comprehension

Kadar

Othman

Wahab

et al. 2019

JCRINN

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Representing any ideas with pictures rather than words is intuitively more appealing because a visual presentation can be more readily understood than that of textual-based. Program visualisation is one of the techniques that can be used in teaching to help users in understanding how programs work. Program visualisation technique is a mental image or a visual representation of an object, scene, person or abstraction that is similar to visual perception. This technique is significant to users because the criteria of source code cannot be physically viewed. It is applicable in the process of writing programs as it helps users to understand their codes better. The purpose of program visualisation is to translate a program into a graphical view to show either the program code, data or control flow. Visualisation technique uses the capability of human visual system to enhance program comprehensibility. Thus, this study uses program visualisation technique to represent program domain in a graphical view to help novices in improving their comprehension. This research aims to support beginners or novice programmers who have been exposed to programming languages by providing effective visualisation technique.

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Challenges in Program Comprehension

Cited by 13 publications

References 5 publications

A case study on co-evolution of software artifacts using integrated views

A case study on co-evolution of software artifacts using integrated views

Swarm debugging: The collective intelligence on interactive debugging

Semantic Metadata Information (SMI) Visualisation Technique Using the Integration of Ontology and UML Graph-Based Approach to Support Program Comprehension

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