Individual differences in program comprehension strategies in unfamiliar programming systems

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.

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