Bloom´s taxonomy: a framework for assessing programmers´ knowledge of software systems

Programmers must attain knowledge about a system before they can perform specific software maintenance tasks on it. Traditionally, computer scientists have described the activity of attaining this knowledge as ´software comprehension´. However, if we look at the educational literature, attainable knowledge has been described with much finer granularity. Bloom´s (1956) taxonomy identifies six separate levels of knowledge within the cognitive domain, one of which refers to a (more constricted) definition of comprehension. Several other levels in Bloom´s taxonomy seem to correlate more directly to specific software maintenance tasks. This article reviews Bloom´s taxonomy as a richer descriptive framework for programmers´ knowledge of code and illustrates how various software maintenance tasks map to knowledge levels in this hierarchy. A pilot study is presented showing how participants´ knowledge of software may differ at various levels of this hierarchy.