Content area

Abstract

During software development and maintenance, developers spend a considerable amount of time on program comprehension activities. Previous studies show that program comprehension takes up as much as half of a developer's time. However, most of these studies are performed in a controlled setting, or with a small number of participants, and investigate the program comprehension activities only within the IDEs. However, developers' program comprehension activities go well beyond their IDE interactions. In this paper, we extend our ActivitySpace framework to collect and analyze Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) data across many applications (not just the IDEs). We follow Minelli et al.'s approach to assign developers' activities into four categories: navigation, editing, comprehension, and other. We then measure the comprehension time by calculating the time that developers spend on program comprehension, e.g., inspecting console and breakpoints in IDE, or reading and understanding tutorials in web browsers. Using this approach, we can perform a more realistic investigation of program comprehension activities, through a field study of program comprehension in practice across a total of seven real projects, on 78 professional developers, and amounting to 3,148 working hours. Our study leverages interaction data that is collected across many applications by the developers. Our study finds that on average developers spend ~58 percent of their time on program comprehension activities, and that they frequently use web browsers and document editors to perform program comprehension activities. We also investigate the impact of programming language, developers' experience, and project phase on the time that is spent on program comprehension, and we find senior developers spend significantly less percentages of time on program comprehension than junior developers. Our study also highlights the importance of several research directions needed to reduce program comprehension time, e.g., building automatic detection and improvement of low quality code and documentation, construction of software-engineering-specific search engines, designing better IDEs that help developers navigate code and browse information more efficiently, etc.

Details

10000008
Title
Measuring Program Comprehension: A Large-Scale Field Study with Professionals
Publication title
Volume
44
Issue
10
Pages
951-976
Number of pages
26
Publication year
2018
Publication date
2018
Publisher
IEEE Computer Society
Place of publication
New York
Country of publication
United States
Publication subject
ISSN
00985589
e-ISSN
19393520
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
Document type
Journal Article
ProQuest document ID
2121920791
Document URL
https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/measuring-program-comprehension-large-scale-field/docview/2121920791/se-2?accountid=208611
Copyright
Copyright IEEE Computer Society 2018
Last updated
2023-11-25
Database
ProQuest One Academic