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Comprehension effort and programming activities: related? or not related?

Author:

Akond RahmanAuthors Info & Claims

MSR '18: Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories

Pages 66 - 69

https://doi.org/10.1145/3196398.3196470

Published: 28 May 2018 Publication History

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Abstract

Researchers have observed programmers to allocate considerable amount of effort in program comprehension. But, how does program comprehension effort relate with programming activities? We answer this question by conducting an empirical study using the MSR 2018 Mining Challenge Dataset. We quantify programmers' comprehension effort, and investigate the relationship between program comprehension effort and four programming activities: navigating, editing, building projects, and debugging. We observe when programmers are involved in high comprehension effort they navigate and make edits at a significantly slower rate. However, we do not observe any significant differences in programmers' build and debugging behavior, when programmers are involved in high comprehension effort. Our findings suggest that the relationship between program comprehension effort and programming activities is nuanced, as not all programming activities associate with program comprehension effort.

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Cited By

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Mendes WPinheiro OSantos ERocha LViana W(2022)Dazed and Confused: Studying the Prevalence of Atoms of Confusion in Long-Lived Java Libraries2022 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME)10.1109/ICSME55016.2022.00018(106-116)Online publication date: Oct-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSME55016.2022.00018
Mondal SDas PBhattacharjee Rudra T(2022)Measuring code comprehension effort using code reading patternSādhanā10.1007/s12046-022-01876-547:3Online publication date: 17-Jun-2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/s12046-022-01876-5
Yong WSanMing LJun LXiangyu CWan Z(2020)Lightweight Fault Localization using Weighted Dynamic Control Flow SubgraphInternational Journal of Performability Engineering10.23940/ijpe.20.02.p6.21422216:2(214)Online publication date: 2020
https://doi.org/10.23940/ijpe.20.02.p6.214222
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Index Terms

Comprehension effort and programming activities: related? or not related?
1. Human-centered computing
  1. Human computer interaction (HCI)
    1. Empirical studies in HCI

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Information

Published In

MSR '18: Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories

May 2018

627 pages

ISBN:9781450357166

DOI:10.1145/3196398

General Chair:
Andy Zaidman
Delft University of Technology, Netherlands
,
Program Chairs:
Yasutaka Kamei
Kyushu University, Japan
,
Emily Hill
Drew University

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

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Published: 28 May 2018

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ICSE '18

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SIGSOFT
IEEE-CS

ICSE '18: 40th International Conference on Software Engineering

May 28 - 29, 2018

Gothenburg, Sweden

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ICSE 2025

2025 IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering

April 26 - May 3, 2025

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Cited By

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Mendes WPinheiro OSantos ERocha LViana W(2022)Dazed and Confused: Studying the Prevalence of Atoms of Confusion in Long-Lived Java Libraries2022 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME)10.1109/ICSME55016.2022.00018(106-116)Online publication date: Oct-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSME55016.2022.00018
Mondal SDas PBhattacharjee Rudra T(2022)Measuring code comprehension effort using code reading patternSādhanā10.1007/s12046-022-01876-547:3Online publication date: 17-Jun-2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/s12046-022-01876-5
Yong WSanMing LJun LXiangyu CWan Z(2020)Lightweight Fault Localization using Weighted Dynamic Control Flow SubgraphInternational Journal of Performability Engineering10.23940/ijpe.20.02.p6.21422216:2(214)Online publication date: 2020
https://doi.org/10.23940/ijpe.20.02.p6.214222
Alqadi BMaletic J(2020)Slice-Based Cognitive Complexity Metrics for Defect Prediction2020 IEEE 27th International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER)10.1109/SANER48275.2020.9054836(411-422)Online publication date: Feb-2020
https://doi.org/10.1109/SANER48275.2020.9054836
Sami AKakolaki RTaghados A(2019)Impact of Team Size, Project Scale and Level of Education on Software Build Event Status in Enriched Event Streams2019 27th Iranian Conference on Electrical Engineering (ICEE)10.1109/IranianCEE.2019.8786442(2045-2049)Online publication date: Apr-2019
https://doi.org/10.1109/IranianCEE.2019.8786442

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