Program comprehension levels of abstraction for novices

Shargabi, Amal; Aljunid, S. A.; Annamalai, Muthukkaruppanan; Shuhidan, Shamila Mohamed; Zin, Abdullah Mohd

doi:10.1109/i4ct.2015.7219568

Cited by 7 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 14 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…A few refinements of theoretical program comprehension models also entered the scientific literature in the 2010s [5,35,48], but the decade was marked in particular by studies that examined program comprehension in practice. Maalej et al [32] conducted a mixed methods study in which they observed and interviewed 28 software professionals and surveyed 1477 others about their comprehension strategies, the nature of the knowledge relevant to understanding, and the use of comprehension tools.…”

Section: The 2010s: What Happens In Practice?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Anchoring code understandability evaluations through task descriptions

Wyrich

Merz

Graziotin

2022

Proceedings of the 30th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Program Comprehension

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Be it in debugging, testing, code review or, more recently, pair programming with AI assistance: in all these activities, software engineers need to understand source code. Accordingly, plenty of research is taking place in the field to find out, for example, what makes code easy to understand and which tools can best support developers in their comprehension process. And while any code comprehension researcher certainly has a rough idea of what they mean when they mention a developer having a good understanding of a piece of code, to date, the research community has not managed to define source code comprehension as a concept. Instead, in primary research on code comprehension, an implicit definition by task prevails, i.e., code comprehension is what the experimental tasks measure. This approach has two negative consequences. First, it makes it difficult to conduct secondary research. Currently, each code comprehension primary study uses different comprehension tasks and measures, and thus it is not clear whether different studies intend to measure the same construct. Second, authors of a primary study run into the difficulty of justifying their design decisions without a definition of what they attempt to measure. An operationalization of an insufficiently described construct occurs, which poses a threat to construct validity.The task of defining code comprehension considering the theory of the past fifty years is not an easy one. Nor is it a task that every author of a primary study must accomplish on their own. Therefore, this paper constitutes a reference work that defines source code comprehension and presents a conceptual framework in which researchers can anchor their empirical code comprehension research. CCS CONCEPTS• Software and its engineering → Maintaining software; • General and reference → Reference works.

show abstract

Section: The 2010s: What Happens In Practice?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Anchoring code understandability evaluations through task descriptions

Wyrich

Merz

Graziotin

2022

Proceedings of the 30th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Program Comprehension

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Modifications in the program code which have occurred time to time generally increases the level of complexity of comprehension and reduce understandability level [2]. Syntax, semantics and statement logic organization are necessary to analyze and document to find a relationship with domain of program classification.…”

Section: Program and Its Relationship Layermentioning

confidence: 99%

Program Comprehension and Analysis

Praveen¹

2016

IJEACS

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

-Due to continuous change in business requirements and to implement proactive, adaptive maintenance procedures in application program; it is required to evolve application program time to time. Program comprehension is a process of program understanding and reverse engineering, which supports the analyst to easily undertake the program for further reengineering. This paper highlights the program elements, components, its analytical solutions for understanding, comprehensions and extension.

show abstract

“…In the exemplary contribution of A. Shargabi et al [13] special tasks are performed by the participants of an experiment that call implicitly some program comprehension processes at various levels of abstraction. It is postulated, the tasks impact the comprehension faculty of participants that is later assessed by tests.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Monitoring and control of the program comprehension teaching in a computer class environment

Gagarin¹

2023

P Sci Edu

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Introduction. The comprehension of computer programs is claimed to be a decisive faculty and even skill of any successful exercising professional duties of program engineers, for example, prototype analysis, decision making and discussion about algorithms and structures, development of detailed documentation, test development and test analysis. Exercising of the duties demands from the engineer a special competence to judge about a program behavior basing on the consideration of its source and sometimes digital codes, screenshots, execution protocols. The skill and opportunity to make trial runs can supplement but not replace the competence. Manifesting itself on particular programs it is not a presentation of an extensive and deep familiarity with the programs, but results from the experience with a lot of programs and is obscured by another competence, the competence of the developer. This paper is aimed to precise the interpretation of the notion “program comprehension”, to research the opportunities of a purposeful and enhanced teaching the program comprehension, to develop methods and tools for the assessment of the program comprehension teaching in the higher school. The aim is relevant because of current university curricula allot considerable lecture and laboratory time for teaching programming, including program comprehension. But this time is constantly not enough in view of a growing intensity of innovations in the area of the program engineering. The problem of a control over processes of the program comprehension fostering in a computer class is a key problem of achieving the aim having been set. Materials and methods. The research is based on the university syllabi, the author’s lecture notes, protocols of experimental and sample runs of the developed programs, Internet resources, such as site of the ACM and others. The following research methods were used: terminological analysis and elaboration of a vocabulary demanded in the research and discourse within the paper; modelling and simulation, including a theoretical conceptual model representation of the program comprehension, a computer program simulation of the monitoring and control over the comprehension progress; an UMLpresentation and a trial implementation of the proposed interface for the program comprehension monitoring and control. Research results. Redefinition of conceptual cognitive models of program comprehension is proposed. The program comprehension is postulated to be a state of the cognitive knowledge base that represents an actual affordance of giving correct answers to questions about an eventual program behavior. This model highlights a special kind of teaching to be called “didactic parsing” that is targeted to generate at the audience a comprehension of programs being parsed. Dynamics of question and answers during the didactic parsing is used for assessing the education success and, finally, for a control of the teaching tempo. A user interface for learning computer systems (counters, controls and policies) are proposed to assist in monitoring and control of the didactic parsing. Sample implementation of the interface is built in JL (Joint Lesson) computer system. A graph model and a corresponding simulation program are developed that capture relevant dynamic features of control over the didactic parsing and are applied for the further investigation and demonstration of general didactic parsing effects as well as an aid for planning and control of program comprehension teaching during particular lectures. Conclusion. The research results provide creation of an environment, methods and tools enabling to positively impact the processes of program comprehension attainment. In particular, they permit to control the program comprehension level at a particular audience, adjust style of teaching to be most applicable to it, refine time plans of lectures in the area of program engineering.

show abstract

Program comprehension levels of abstraction for novices

Cited by 7 publications

References 14 publications

Anchoring code understandability evaluations through task descriptions

Anchoring code understandability evaluations through task descriptions

Program Comprehension and Analysis

Monitoring and control of the program comprehension teaching in a computer class environment

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About