Syntactic/semantic interactions in programmer behavior: A model and experimental results

Shneiderman, Ben; Mayer, Richard E.

doi:10.1007/bf00977789

Cited by 284 publications

(132 citation statements)

References 20 publications

(5 reference statements)

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“…Differential results for the two types of errors offer some validity for the syntactic/semantic model of programmer behavior developed by Shneiderman and Mayer 78 . This model distinguishes between information which is language specific (syntactic) and language independent (semantic).…”

Section: Conditional Statementsmentioning

confidence: 54%

Measurement and experimentation in software engineering

Curtis

1980

Proc. IEEE

112

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Section: Conditional Statementsmentioning

confidence: 54%

Measurement and experimentation in software engineering

Curtis

1980

Proc. IEEE

112

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“…Examples of bottom-up models can be found in Pennington (1987) and Shneiderman & Mayer (1979). Typically, a developer uses top-down comprehension where possible and switches to bottom-up comprehension where necessary.…”

Section: Program Comprehension Measuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

Do background colors improve program comprehension in the #ifdef hell?

et al. 2012

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Software-product-line engineering aims at the development of variable and reusable software systems. In practice, software product lines are often implemented with preprocessors. Preprocessor directives are easy to use, and many mature tools are available for practitioners. However, preprocessor directives have been heavily criticized in academia and even referred to as "#ifdef hell", because they introduce threats to program comprehension and correctness. There are many voices that suggest to use other implementation techniques instead, but these voices ignore the fact that a transition from preprocessors to other languages and tools is tedious, erroneous, and expensive in practice. Instead, we and others propose to increase the readability of preprocessor directives by using background colors to highlight source code annotated with ifdef directives. In three controlled experiments with over 70 subjects in total, we evaluate whether and how background colors improve program comprehension in preprocessor-based implementations. Our results demonstrate that background colors have the potential to improve program This is the authors' version and intended for personal use only. Any other use may violate the copyright. comprehension, independently of size and programming language of the underlying product. Additionally, we found that subjects generally favor background colors. We integrate these and other findings in a tool called FeatureCommander, which facilitates program comprehension in practice and which can serve as a basis for further research.

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“…The situation model represents the problem domain or the real world. Shneiderman and Mayer have proposed another model, according to which the process of program comprehension transforms the knowledge of the program that is retained in short-term memory into internal semantic knowledge via a chunking process [19]. Mayrhauser and Vans have proposed a model they have named "integrated metamodel", which consists of four main components: the top-down model, situation model, program model and knowledge base [20].…”

Section: Analysability Of Object-oriented Softwarementioning

confidence: 99%