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Context: Application Programming Interface (API) code examples are an essential knowledge resource for learning APIs. However, a few user studies have explored how the structural characteristics of the source code in code examples impact…
Developers spend a large portion of their time and effort on comprehending source code. While many studies have investigated how developers approach these comprehension tasks and what factors influence their success, less is known about how…
Developers interrupting their participation in a project might slowly forget critical information about the code, such as its intended purpose, structure, the impact of external dependencies, and the approach used for implementation.…
Producing high-quality code is essential as it makes a codebase more maintainable, reducing the cost and effort associated with a project. However, students learning to program are often given short, automatically graded programming tasks…
The relevance of code comprehension in a developer's daily work was recognized more than 40 years ago. Consequently, many experiments were conducted to find out how developers could be supported during code comprehension and which code…
Context: Various approaches aim to support program comprehension by automatically detecting algorithms in source code. However, no empirical evaluations of their helpfulness have been performed. Objective: To empirically evaluate how…
The boom in mobile apps has changed the traditional landscape of software development by introducing new challenges due to the limited resources of mobile devices, e.g., memory, CPU, network bandwidth and battery. The energy consumption of…
Previous works from research and industry have proposed a spatial representation of code in a canvas, arguing that a navigational code space confers developers the freedom to organise elements according to their understanding. By allowing…
Background: Developers spend a lot of their time on understanding source code. Static code analysis tools can draw attention to code that is difficult for developers to understand. However, most of the findings are based on non-validated…
Be it in debugging, testing, code review or, more recently, pair programming with AI assistance: in all these activities, software engineers need to understand source code. Accordingly, plenty of research is taking place in the field to…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have rapidly transformed software development, especially in code generation. However, their inconsistent performance, prone to hallucinations and quality issues, complicates program comprehension and hinders…
Static code analysis tools and integrated development environments present developers with quality-related software metrics, some of which describe the understandability of source code. Software metrics influence overarching strategic…
During software evolution, inexperienced developers may introduce design anti-patterns when they modify their software systems to fix bugs or to add new functionalities based on changes in requirements. Developers may also use design…
This research paper aims to find, analyze and understand code patterns in any software system and measure its quality by defining standards and proposing a formula for the same. Every code that is written can be divided into different code…
What factors impact the comprehensibility of code? Previous research suggests that expectation-congruent programs should take less time to understand and be less prone to errors. We present an experiment in which participants with…
A concern can be characterized as a developer's intent behind a piece of code, often not explicitly captured in it. We discuss a technique of recording concerns using source code annotations (concern annotations). Using two studies and two…
The goal of our study is to evaluate the effect on program comprehension of three factors that have not previously been studied in a single experiment. These factors are programmer expertise (expert vs. novice), programming task…
Context: Software architecture is a knowledge-intensive field. One mechanism for storing architecture knowledge is the recognition and description of architectural patterns. Selecting architectural patterns is a challenging task for…
There are repetitive patterns in strategies of manipulating source code. For example, modifying source code before acquiring knowledge of how a code works is a depth-first style and reading and understanding before modifying source code is…
Increasing the impact of software engineering research in the software industry and the society at large has long been a concern of high priority for the software engineering community. The problem of two cultures, research conducted in a…