The impact of tools supported in integrated-development environments on program comprehension

Program comprehension is a cognitive task done by a software programmer. Task is usually done manually, but in some cases tool support inside integrated development environment can facilitate the hard work. In order to test those tools, a study between manual program comprehension and program comprehension with tool support is presented in this paper. An empirical study that faces the alternatives has been done. In experiment, the same test has been used twice (with and without tools) and results have been compared and statistically analyzed in terms of test correctness and efficiency. The results regarding program comprehension with students confirm significant benefits in terms of correctness when using tools for program comprehension.