Synthesizing Research on Programmers' Mental Models of Programs, Tasks and Concepts -- a Systematic Literature Review

Heinonen, Ava; Lehtelä, Bettina; Hellas, Arto; Fagerholm, Fabian

doi:10.48550/arxiv.2212.07763

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…The literature on novice programmers, while differing on the definition of mental models, is generally in agreement that novice programmer mental models are flawed and ineffectual [9,43]. We refer the reader to a recent review of the literature on programmers' mental models for a comprehensive look at this area of research [34]. O'Dell [71] argued that all programs represent complex changes in state of a system over time and that programmers must therefore rely on mental models of the system during program development in order to be able to problem solve and reason about the behaviour of a program.…”

Section: Domain Knowledgementioning

confidence: 99%

A Think-Aloud Study of Novice Debugging

Whalley

Settle

Luxton-Reilly

2023

ACM Trans. Comput. Educ.

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Debugging is a core skill required by programmers, yet we know little about how to effectively teach the process of debugging. The challenges of learning debugging are compounded for novices who lack experience and are still learning the tools they need to program effectively. In this work, we report a case study in which we used a think-aloud protocol to gain insight into the behaviour of three students engaged in debugging tasks. Our qualitative analysis reveals a variety of helpful practices and barriers that limit the effectiveness of debugging. We observe that comprehension, evidence-based activities, and workflow practices all contribute to novice debugging success. Lack of sustained effort, precision, and methodical processes negatively impact debugging effectiveness. We anticipate that understanding how students engage in debugging tasks will aid future work to address ineffective behaviours and promote effective debugging activities.

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Section: Domain Knowledgementioning

confidence: 99%

A Think-Aloud Study of Novice Debugging

Whalley

Settle

Luxton-Reilly

2023

ACM Trans. Comput. Educ.

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“…as "a maintainer's mental representation of the program to be understood" [59] and "an internal, working representation of the software under consideration" [63]. According to a recent meta-study on mental representations during program comprehension, this description captures the essence on which the community could agree [22]. At the same time, it should be mentioned that it would be difficult to find controversies at present anyway, since research in the field of mental representations during program comprehension has unfortunately declined considerably [6,22].…”

Section: Harth and Dugerdil [21]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

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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.

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Synthesizing Research on Programmers' Mental Models of Programs, Tasks and Concepts -- a Systematic Literature Review

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

A Think-Aloud Study of Novice Debugging

A Think-Aloud Study of Novice Debugging

Anchoring code understandability evaluations through task descriptions

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