The effects of naming style and expertise on program comprehension

Teasley, Barbee

doi:10.1006/ijhc.1994.1036

Cited by 31 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 12 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Models of knowledge formation during program understanding [35], [51], which have suggested that a developer's mental model consists of relationships between code elements and the purpose and intent of these elements, are consistent with our description of knowledge as the combination of paths that a developer has traversed in a program over time and their existing knowledge. Finally, because our model describes a pattern of activity that is fundamentally driven by cues offered by the environment and the developers' perceptions of their relevance, it is also consistent with research on the influence of the visual representation of code on program understanding [3], [23], [33], [48].…”

Section: Implications For Theorysupporting

confidence: 63%

“…For example, a number of factors can influence the speed and correctness of comprehension, including the typographic appearance of code [3], the indentation style used [33], the language in which a program is written [23], and naming schemes of identifiers [48]. Although these effects can be quite profound when comparing developers of different expertise, studies have shown that many of these effects disappear with increasing experience [11], [12].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

An Exploratory Study of How Developers Seek, Relate, and Collect Relevant Information during Software Maintenance Tasks

Myers

Coblenz

et al. 2006

IIEEE Trans. Software Eng.

580

336

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Abstract-Much of software developers' time is spent understanding unfamiliar code. To better understand how developers gain this understanding and how software development environments might be involved, a study was performed in which developers were given an unfamiliar program and asked to work on two debugging tasks and three enhancement tasks for 70 minutes. The study found that developers interleaved three activities. They began by searching for relevant code both manually and using search tools; however, they based their searches on limited and misrepresentative cues in the code, environment, and executing program, often leading to failed searches. When developers found relevant code, they followed its incoming and outgoing dependencies, often returning to it and navigating its other dependencies; while doing so, however, Eclipse's navigational tools caused significant overhead. Developers collected code and other information that they believed would be necessary to edit, duplicate, or otherwise refer to later by encoding it in the interactive state of Eclipse's package explorer, file tabs, and scroll bars. However, developers lost track of relevant code as these interfaces were used for other tasks, and developers were forced to find it again. These issues caused developers to spend, on average, 35 percent of their time performing the mechanics of navigation within and between source files. These observations suggest a new model of program understanding grounded in theories of information foraging and suggest ideas for tools that help developers seek, relate, and collect information in a more effective and explicit manner.

show abstract

Section: Implications For Theorysupporting

confidence: 63%

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Exploratory Study of How Developers Seek, Relate, and Collect Relevant Information during Software Maintenance Tasks

Myers

Coblenz

et al. 2006

IIEEE Trans. Software Eng.

580

336

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Corritore and Widenbeck studied the direction of programmers' comprehension strategies, finding that object-oriented programmers tend to start top-down, but use an increasingly bottom-up approach as they work [5]. Teasley studied the effects of naming-style [17], finding that poorly named program elements can affect novice comprehension, but have little impact on expert comprehension. Green compared the impact of textual and visual languages, finding that visual languages better facilitate the understanding of dataflow, but incur more interactive overhead when editing [11].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Eliciting design requirements for maintenance-oriented ides: a detailed study of corrective and perfective maintenance tasks

Aung

Myers

Proceedings. 27th International Conference on Software Engineering, 2005. ICSE 2005.

124

133

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Recently, several innovative tools have found their way into mainstream use in modern development environments. However, most of these tools have focused on creating and modifying code, despite evidence that most of programmers' time is spent understanding code as part of maintenance tasks. If new tools were designed to directly support these maintenance tasks, what types would be most helpful? To find out, a study of expert Java programmers using Eclipse was performed. The study suggests that maintenance work consists of three activities: (1) forming a working set of task-relevant code fragments; (2) navigating the dependencies within this working set; and (3) repairing or creating the necessary code. The study identified several trends in these activities, as well as many opportunities for new tools that could save programmers up to 35% of the time they currently spend on maintenance tasks.

show abstract

“…Empirical understandability tests have been carried out to find out how people understand source programs. Tests related to naming are reported in [2,15,16,17,18]. The effect of naming has usually been tested by presenting a badly named source program to a group of students and the same program with more informative names to another group of students.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Supposing that the mentioned understandability tests had produced statistically significant data in support of natural naming, we could still not be completely sure that natural naming would be useful in practical software development work, because the experiments were done during a short period of time and with students. Supposing also that experiments in a classroom would never produce any significant data, it could still be possible that natural naming would be useful in practical work [17]. Because it is hard to do controlled experiments in which we could compare two different groups building the same real software system using different naming styles, we have to rely on the opinions and intuitions of people.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Natural naming in software development: Feedback from practitioners

Laitinen

1995

Notes on Numerical Fluid Mechanics and Multidisciplinary Design

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

During a five-year period several groups of software developers have been educated on using natural naming in software development. Generally, natural naming means avoiding abbreviations. In programming it means that program elements such as variables, tables, constants, and functions should be named using whole natural words and grammatical rules of a natural language. To assess the usefulness of natural naming and the importance of naming in general, we have requested the opinions of 52 software developers who have participated in naming courses or to whom a naming handbook has been introduced. The subjects had to judge the relevancy of 25 statements related to naming. The results of the inquiry indicate that most software developers, and especially the experienced ones, consider that natural naming facilitates their work.

show abstract

The effects of naming style and expertise on program comprehension

Cited by 31 publications

References 12 publications

An Exploratory Study of How Developers Seek, Relate, and Collect Relevant Information during Software Maintenance Tasks

An Exploratory Study of How Developers Seek, Relate, and Collect Relevant Information during Software Maintenance Tasks

Eliciting design requirements for maintenance-oriented ides: a detailed study of corrective and perfective maintenance tasks

Natural naming in software development: Feedback from practitioners

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About