Does Code Structure Affect Comprehension? On Using and Naming Intermediate Variables

Cates, Roee; Yunik, Nadav; Feitelson, Dror G.

doi:10.1109/icpc52881.2021.00020

Cited by 8 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…Furthermore, we intended to utilise the code examples available on the Joda-Time documentation page. 6 However, we found that these examples were not complex enough. Thus, we decided to create our own examples.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 90%

“…API code examples. We chose the Joda-Time 6 Java library because it addresses a well-known concept (i.e. date and time handling).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A large number of studies investigated the impact of various source code characteristics on programmers' code comprehension. These characteristics include the use of intermediate variables [6], certain syntactic structures such as ifs and for loops [2], different identifier names [4,12] as well as naming conventions [5,21]. Moreover, some studies explored the effects of more global factors such as the order of methods [11], code regularity [14], and the linearity of source code and reading order [17].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Synthesising Linear API Usage Examples for API Documentation

Alharbi

Kolovos

Matragkas

2022

2022 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME)

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Code examples are essential resources for learning application programming interfaces (APIs). The shortage of such examples can be a major learning obstacle for API users. Writing and maintaining effective API usage examples can also be an effort-intensive and repetitive process for API developers because API users ideally want such examples to be simple, standalone, and linear. To address these challenges, several approaches have been proposed to automatically extract API code examples from various resources and embed them into official API documents; however, little emphasis has been placed on addressing the underlying issue directly and helping API developers write and maintain API usage examples. In this paper, we present a new approach for automatically synthesising linear code examples from less repetitive versions by in-lining reusable utility methods. The proposed approach aims to benefit API developers in terms of productivity and maintainability, as well as API users in terms of API learnability and comprehension. We have implemented the proposed approach in a prototype for the Java programming language, which we also discuss in this paper.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 90%

“…API code examples. We chose the Joda-Time 6 Java library because it addresses a well-known concept (i.e. date and time handling).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Synthesising Linear API Usage Examples for API Documentation

Alharbi

Kolovos

Matragkas

2022

2022 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME)

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Considerations and Pitfalls for Reducing Threats to the Validity of Controlled Experiments on Code Comprehension

Feitelson

2022

Empir Software Eng

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Guidelines for using financial incentives in software-engineering experimentation

Krüger,

Çalıklı,

Bershadskyy

et al. 2024

Empir Software Eng

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Context: Empirical studies with human participants (e.g., controlled experiments) are established methods in Software Engineering (SE) research to understand developers’ activities or the pros and cons of a technique, tool, or practice. Various guidelines and recommendations on designing and conducting different types of empirical studies in SE exist. However, the use of financial incentives (i.e., paying participants to compensate for their effort and improve the validity of a study) is rarely mentioned Objective: In this article, we analyze and discuss the use of financial incentives for human-oriented SE experimentation to derive corresponding guidelines and recommendations for researchers. Specifically, we propose how to extend the current state-of-the-art and provide a better understanding of when and how to incentivize. Method: We captured the state-of-the-art in SE by performing a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) involving 105 publications from six conferences and five journals published in 2020 and 2021. Then, we conducted an interdisciplinary analysis based on guidelines from experimental economics and behavioral psychology, two disciplines that research and use financial incentives. Results: Our results show that financial incentives are sparsely used in SE experimentation, mostly as completion fees. Especially performance-based and task-related financial incentives (i.e., payoff functions) are not used, even though we identified studies for which the validity may benefit from tailored payoff functions. To tackle this issue, we contribute an overview of how experiments in SE may benefit from financial incentivisation, a guideline for deciding on their use, and 11 recommendations on how to design them. Conclusions: We hope that our contributions get incorporated into standards (e.g., the ACM SIGSOFT Empirical Standards), helping researchers understand whether the use of financial incentives is useful for their experiments and how to define a suitable incentivisation strategy.

show abstract

Does Code Structure Affect Comprehension? On Using and Naming Intermediate Variables

Cited by 8 publications

References 22 publications

Synthesising Linear API Usage Examples for API Documentation

Synthesising Linear API Usage Examples for API Documentation

Considerations and Pitfalls for Reducing Threats to the Validity of Controlled Experiments on Code Comprehension

Guidelines for using financial incentives in software-engineering experimentation

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