Designing your Next Empirical Study on Program Comprehension

Penta, Massimiliano Di; Stirewalt, R. E. Kurt; Kraemer, Eileen

doi:10.1109/icpc.2007.17

Cited by 31 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…The preparation and execution of the experiment followed the standardized guidelines provided by Di Penta et al in [4].…”

Section: Discussion About the Experimentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The realization of a controlled experiment is not yet standardized. Although there are works on that direction, like in [4], there are always experiments not following such standardization and go through ad-hoc means to achieve the same results. We tried to prepare a standard experiment, however in some cases we may have missed it and go through non-standard ways.…”

Section: Does the Synchronized Visualization Of The Program And Problmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Influence of Synchronized Domain Visualizations on Program Comprehension

Oliveira

Pereira

Cruz

et al. 2010

2010 IEEE 18th International Conference on Program Comprehension

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An effective program comprehension is reached when it is possible to view and relate what happens when the program is executed, synchronized with its effects in the real world concepts. This enables the interconnection of program's meaning at both problem and program domains.To sustain this statement we need (i) to develop a tool which provides and synchronizes views at both domains, and (ii) to perform an experiment to measure the actual impact of this approach.So, in this working session we aim at discussing the benefits of providing synchronized domain visualizations. We also envisage to discuss the preparation and conduction of appropriate experiments that will test that benefits.A case study will be used and the discussion will be supported by experimental material specially prepared for the occasion, but adapted from material already used in previous experiments.

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“…The preparation and execution of the experiment followed the standardized guidelines provided by Di Penta et al in [4].…”

Section: Discussion About the Experimentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Does the Synchronized Visualization Of The Program And Problmentioning

confidence: 99%

Influence of Synchronized Domain Visualizations on Program Comprehension

Oliveira

Pereira

Cruz

et al. 2010

2010 IEEE 18th International Conference on Program Comprehension

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“…They were given "AspectJ Language Quick Reference" from [Colyer et al, 2004] and they were free to use any other documentation. The 6 In [Penta et al, 2007] the authors discuss the identification of an appropriate subject population as still being an open issue.…”

Section: Participants In Categorymentioning

confidence: 99%

Overcoming comprehension barriers in the AspectJ programming language.

Arnaoudova¹,

Eshkevari²,

Safari-Sharifabadi³

et al. 2008

JOT

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It has now been over a decade since the introduction of Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP). As the AspectJ programming language (being one of the notable technologies of AOP) gains acceptance in industry and academia, its comprehensibility property is an important factor in determining an eventual wide acceptance by practitioners in development and maintenance as well as by educators who aim at introducing AOP into their curricula. Our objective is to improve program comprehension by identifying and addressing potential pitfalls in code which tend to make comprehension not intuitive. In those subtle places, we observe the behavior of the program to see the degree to which it matches the expected results. In cases where a conflict occurs, we provide a reasoning to point out where it would originate from, and a resolution to the conflict where applicable.

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“…Di Penta et al synthesized a set of guidelines for designing empirical studies in the field of program comprehension [PSK07]. Some of the pitfalls of breaking these guidelines are severe, such as data that fails to support even true hypotheses, or conclusions that are not statistically significant due to insufficient data points.…”

Section: Kitchenham Et Al [Kppmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Provide all the details needed to make the experiment replicable. We followed the guidelines of Di Penta et al [PSK07] and made available the materials and results to facilitate its evaluation and replication:…”

Section: Wish List Extracted From the Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Software systems as cities

Wettel

Lanza

Robbes

2011

Proceedings of the 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering

149

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Software understanding takes up a large share of the total cost of a software system. The high costs attributed to software understanding activities are caused by the size and complexity of software systems, by the continuous evolution that these systems are subject to, and by the lack of physical presence which makes software intangible. Reverse engineering helps practitioners deal with the intrinsic complexity of software, by providing a broad range of patterns and techniques. One of these techniques is software visualization, which makes software more tangible, by providing visible representations of software systems.Interpreting a visualization is by no means trivial and requires knowledge about the visual language of the visualization. One means to ease the learning of a new visualization's language are metaphors, which allow the interpretation of new data representations by analogy. Possibly one of the most popular metaphors for software visualization is the city metaphor, which has been explored in the past by a number of researchers. However, in spite of the efforts, the value of this metaphor for reverse engineering has never been taken beyond anecdotical evidence.In this dissertation, we demonstrate the value of the city metaphor for reverse engineering along two directions. On the one hand, we show that the metaphor is versatile enough to allow the representation of different facets of software. On the other hand, we show that the city metaphor enables the creation of software visualizations which efficiently and effectively support reverse engineering activities.Our interpretation of the city metaphor at its core depicts the system as a city, the packages as districts, and the classes as buildings. The resulting "code city" visualization provides a structural overview of the software system, enriched with contextual data. To be able to perform analyses of real systems using our approach, we implemented a tool called CodeCity.We demonstrate the versatility of the metaphor, by using it in three different analysis contexts, i.e., program comprehension, software evolution analysis, and software design quality assessment. For each of the contexts, we describe the visualization techniques we employ to encode the contextual data in the visualization and we illustrate the application by means of case studies. The insights gained in the three analysis contexts are complementary to each other, leading to an increasingly more complete "big picture" of the systems.We then demonstrate how the visualizations built on top of our city metaphor effectively and efficiently support reverse engineering activities, by means of an extensive controlled experiment. The design of our experiment is based on a list of desiderata that we extracted from our survey of the current body of research. We conducted the experiment over a period of six months, in four sites located in three countries, with a heterogeneous sample of subjects composed of fair shares of both academics and industry practitioners. The main result of ...

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Designing your Next Empirical Study on Program Comprehension

Abstract: Abstract

Cited by 31 publications

References 24 publications

Influence of Synchronized Domain Visualizations on Program Comprehension

Influence of Synchronized Domain Visualizations on Program Comprehension

Overcoming comprehension barriers in the AspectJ programming language.

Software systems as cities

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