DocumentCode
3450582
Title
Individual differences in program comprehension strategies in unfamiliar programming systems
Author
Ko, Andrew Jensen ; Uttl, Bob
Author_Institution
Sch. of Comput. Sci., Carnegie Mellon Univ., Pittsburgh, PA, USA
fYear
2003
fDate
10-11 May 2003
Firstpage
175
Lastpage
184
Abstract
This study examines the effect of individual differences on the program comprehension strategies of users working with an unfamiliar programming system. Participants of varying programming expertise were given a battery of psychological tests, a brief introduction to a statistical programming environment, and a 20-minute debugging task. Our data show three distinct comprehension strategies that were related to programming experience, but individuals with stronger domain knowledge for specific bugs tended to succeed.
Keywords
human factors; program debugging; programming environments; reverse engineering; debugging task; individual differences; program comprehension strategies; program understanding; programming experience; programming expertise; psychological tests; statistical programming environment; unfamiliar programming systems; Art; Batteries; Computer bugs; Computer science; Debugging; Documentation; Educational institutions; Predictive models; Programming profession; Psychology;
fLanguage
English
Publisher
ieee
Conference_Titel
Program Comprehension, 2003. 11th IEEE International Workshop on
ISSN
1092-8138
Print_ISBN
0-7695-1883-4
Type
conf
DOI
10.1109/WPC.2003.1199201
Filename
1199201
Link To Document