Supporting comprehension of unfamiliar programs by modeling cues

Developers need to comprehend a program before modifying it. In such cases, developers use cues to establish the relevance of a piece of information with a task. Being familiar with different kinds of cues will help the developers to comprehend a program faster. But unlike the experienced developers, novice developers fail to recognize the relevant cues, because (a) there are many cues and (b) they might be unfamiliar with the artifacts. However, not much is known about the developers’ choice of cue. Hence, we conducted two independent studies to understand the kind of cues used by the developers and how a tool influences their cue selection. First, from our user study on two common comprehension tasks, we found that developers actively seek the cues and their cue source choices are similar but task dependent. In our second exploratory study, we investigated whether an integrated development environment (IDE) influences a developer’s cue choices. By observing their interaction history while fixing bugs in Eclipse IDE, we found that the IDE’s influence on their cue choices was not statistically significant. Finally, as a case in point, we propose a novel task-specific program summarization approach to aid novice developers in comprehending an unfamiliar program. Our approach used developers cue choices to synthesize the summaries. A comparison of the synthesized summaries with the summaries recorded by the developers shows both had similar content. This promising result encourages us to explore task-specific cue models, which can aid novice developers to accomplish complex comprehension tasks faster.

[1]  Thomas D. LaToza,et al.  Maintaining mental models: a study of developer work habits , 2006, ICSE.

[2]  Markku Tukiainen,et al.  An eye-tracking methodology for characterizing program comprehension processes , 2006, ETRA.

[3]  Amela Karahasanovic,et al.  Comprehension strategies and difficulties in maintaining object-oriented systems: An explorative study , 2007, J. Syst. Softw..

[4]  Martin P. Robillard,et al.  How effective developers investigate source code: an exploratory study , 2004, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.

[5]  Abdelwahab Hamou-Lhadj,et al.  Summarizing the Content of Large Traces to Facilitate the Understanding of the Behaviour of a Software System , 2006, 14th IEEE International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC'06).

[6]  Ruven E. Brooks,et al.  Towards a Theory of the Comprehension of Computer Programs , 1983, Int. J. Man Mach. Stud..

[7]  Kate Ehrlich,et al.  Empirical Studies of Programming Knowledge , 1984, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.

[8]  Ruven E. Brooks,et al.  Studying programmer behavior experimentally: the problems of proper methodology , 1980, CACM.

[9]  Thomas A. Corbi,et al.  Program Understanding: Challenge for the 1990s , 1989, IBM Syst. J..

[10]  Peter Pirolli,et al.  Information Foraging , 2009, Encyclopedia of Database Systems.

[11]  Ani Nenkova,et al.  Evaluating Content Selection in Summarization: The Pyramid Method , 2004, NAACL.

[12]  Gail C. Murphy,et al.  Generating natural language summaries for crosscutting source code concerns , 2011, 2011 27th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM).

[13]  Mik Kersten,et al.  How are lava software developers using the eclipse IDE , 2006 .

[14]  Wolfgang Hesse,et al.  Formal Concept Analysis Used for Software Analysis and Modelling , 2005, Formal Concept Analysis.

[15]  David Geer.  Eclipse becomes the dominant Java IDE , 2005, Computer.

[16]  Janice Singer,et al.  An examination of software engineering work practices , 1997, CASCON.

[17]  Mik Kersten,et al.  How are Java software developers using the Elipse IDE? , 2006, IEEE Software.

[18]  Lori L. Pollock,et al.  Automatically detecting and describing high level actions within methods , 2011, 2011 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE).

[19]  Zhendong Su,et al.  Capturing and Exploiting IDE Interactions , 2014, Onward!.

[20]  Anneliese Amschler Andrews,et al.  Program Comprehension During Software Maintenance and Evolution , 1995, Computer.

[21]  Rainer Koschke,et al.  How do professional developers comprehend software? , 2012, 2012 34th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE).

[22]  Peter Pirolli,et al.  Computational models of information scent-following in a very large browsable text collection , 1997, CHI.

[23]  Jelena Vlasenko.  Exploring developer's tool path , 2011, OOPSLA Companion.

[24]  Adele E. Howe,et al.  Program understanding behaviour during enhancement of large-scale software , 1997, J. Softw. Maintenance Res. Pract..

[25]  Brad A. Myers,et al.  An Exploratory Study of How Developers Seek, Relate, and Collect Relevant Information during Software Maintenance Tasks , 2006, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.

[26]  Janice Singer,et al.  How Programmers can Turn Comments into Waypoints for Code Navigation , 2007, 2007 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance.

[27]  Pushpak Bhattacharyya,et al.  Proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Cross Lingual Information Access: Addressing the Information Need of Multilingual Societies , 2009 .

[28]  Thomas Fritz,et al.  Does a programmer's activity indicate knowledge of code? , 2007, ESEC-FSE '07.

[29]  Susan Wiedenbeck,et al.  Beacons: a knowledge structure in program comprehension , 1989 .

[30]  James D. Herbsleb,et al.  Program comprehension as fact finding , 2007, ESEC-FSE '07.

[31]  Yann-Gaël Guéhéneuc,et al.  An empirical study on requirements traceability using eye-tracking , 2012, 2012 28th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM).

[32]  Vasudeva Varma,et al.  Sentence Position revisited: A robust light-weight Update Summarization ‘baseline’ Algorithm , 2009 .

[33]  Gavriel Salvendy,et al.  Proceedings of the third international conference on human-computer interaction on Designing and using human-computer interfaces and knowledge based systems (2nd ed.) , 1989 .

[34]  Mik Kersten,et al.  Using task context to improve programmer productivity , 2006, SIGSOFT '06/FSE-14.

[35]  Andrian Marcus,et al.  Supporting program comprehension with source code summarization , 2010, 2010 ACM/IEEE 32nd International Conference on Software Engineering.

[36]  Stanley Letovsky,et al.  Cognitive processes in program comprehension , 1986, J. Syst. Softw..

[37]  Lori L. Pollock,et al.  Automatic generation of natural language summaries for Java classes , 2013, 2013 21st International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC).

[38]  Ted J. Biggerstaff,et al.  The concept assignment problem in program understanding , 1993, [1993] Proceedings Working Conference on Reverse Engineering.

[39]  Rachel K. E. Bellamy,et al.  Using information scent to model the dynamic foraging behavior of programmers in maintenance tasks , 2008, CHI.

[40]  Jonathan I. Maletic,et al.  An Eye Tracking Study on camelCase and under_score Identifier Styles , 2010, 2010 IEEE 18th International Conference on Program Comprehension.

[41]  Curtis R. Cook,et al.  An Investigation of Procedure and Variable Names as Beacons During Program Comprehension , 1991 .

[42]  Andreas Stefik,et al.  An Empirical Investigation into Programming Language Syntax , 2013, TOCE.

[43]  Jean Scholtz,et al.  The Roles Beacons Play in Comprehension for Novice and Expert Programmers , 2002, PPIG.

[44]  Martin Rinard,et al.  Proceedings of the ACM international conference companion on Object oriented programming systems languages and applications companion , 2010 .

[45]  N. Pennington.  Stimulus structures and mental representations in expert comprehension of computer programs , 1987, Cognitive Psychology.

[46]  Letha H. Etzkorn,et al.  Toward a metrics suite for source code lexicons , 2011, 2011 27th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM).

[47]  Martin P. Robillard,et al.  Selection and presentation practices for code example summarization , 2014, SIGSOFT FSE.

[48]  Margaret-Anne D. Storey,et al.  Theories, tools and research methods in program comprehension: past, present and future , 2006, Software Quality Journal.

[49]  Markus Pizka,et al.  Concise and consistent naming , 2005, 13th International Workshop on Program Comprehension (IWPC'05).