Proceedings Article10.1109/ICSE.2012.6227188
How do professional developers comprehend software
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About: This article is published in International Conference on Software Engineering. The article was published on 01 Jan 2012. The article focuses on the topics: Software documentation & Program comprehension.
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Citations
Measuring Program Comprehension: A Large-Scale Field Study with Professionals
TL;DR: This paper extends the ActivitySpace framework to collect and analyze Human-Computer Interaction data across many applications (not just the IDEs), and finds that on average developers spend on average 58 percent of their time on program comprehension activities, and that they frequently use web browsers and document editors to performprogram comprehension activities.
357
Automatically generating commit messages from diffs using neural machine translation
Siyuan Jiang,Ameer Armaly,Collin McMillan +2 more
- 30 Oct 2017
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors adapt Neural Machine Translation (NMT) to automatically translate diffs into commit messages, and train an NMT algorithm using a corpus of diffs and human-written commit messages from the top 1k Github projects.
327
Automatic Source Code Summarization of Context for Java Methods
Paul W. McBurney,Collin McMillan +1 more
TL;DR: A source code summarization technique that writes English descriptions of Java methods by analyzing how those methods are invoked is proposed and found that while it does not reach the quality of human-written summaries, it does improve over the state-of-the-art summarization tool in several dimensions by a statistically-significant margin.
On the Comprehension of Program Comprehension
Walid Maalej,Rebecca Tiarks,Tobias Roehm,Rainer Koschke +3 more
- 05 Sep 2014
TL;DR: It is found that developers follow pragmatic comprehension strategies depending on context and call for reconsidering the research agendas towards context-aware tool support.
The Work Life of Developers: Activities, Switches and Perceived Productivity
TL;DR: A monitoring application was deployed at 20 computers of professional software developers from four companies for an average of 11 full work day in situ and found that developers spend their time on a wide variety of activities and switch regularly between them, resulting in highly fragmented work.
References
Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods Approaches
TL;DR: The book Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative and Mixed Methods Approaches by Creswell (2014) covers three approaches— qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods.
Towards a theory of the comprehension of computer programs
TL;DR: A sufficiency theory is presented of the process by which a computer programmer attempts to comprehend a program, intended to explain four sources of variation in behavior on this task: the kind of computation the program performs, the intrinsic properties of the program text, such as language and documentation, the reason for which the documentation is needed, and differences among the individuals performing the task.
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An Exploratory Study of How Developers Seek, Relate, and Collect Relevant Information during Software Maintenance Tasks
TL;DR: 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, suggesting a new model of program understanding grounded in theories of information foraging.
767
Maintaining mental models: a study of developer work habits
Thomas D. LaToza,Gina Venolia,Robert DeLine +2 more
- 28 May 2006
TL;DR: It is found that many problems arose because developers were forced to invest great effort recovering implicit knowledge by exploring code and interrupting teammates and this knowledge was only saved in their memory.
Information Needs in Collocated Software Development Teams
Andrew J. Ko,Robert DeLine,Gina Venolia +2 more
- 24 May 2007
TL;DR: This work analyzed software developers' day-to-day information needs at a large software company and transcribed their activities in go-minute sessions to identify information types and cataloged the outcome and source when each type of information was sought.