Quantifying Program Comprehension with Interaction Data

TL;DR: Evidence that code navigation and editing occupies only a small fraction of the time of developers, while the vast majority of thetime is spent on reading & understanding source code is found, indicating that the importance of program comprehension was significantly underestimated by previous research.

Abstract: It is common knowledge that program comprehension takes up a substantial part of software development. This "urban legend" is based on work that dates back decades, which throws up the question whether the advances in software development tools, techniques, and methodologies that have emerged since then may invalidate or confirm the claim. We present an empirical investigation which goal is to confirm or reject the claim, based on interaction data which captures the user interface activities of developers. We use interaction data to empirically quantify the distribution of different developer activities during software development: In particular, we focus on estimating the role of program comprehension. In addition, we investigate if and how different developers and session types influence the duration of such activities. We analyze interaction data from two different contexts: One comes from the ECLIPSE IDE on Java source code development, while the other comes from the PHARO IDE on Smalltalk source code development. We found evidence that code navigation and editing occupies only a small fraction of the time of developers, while the vast majority of the time is spent on reading a understanding source code. In essence, the importance of program comprehension was significantly underestimated by previous research.