Related papers: Developers' Visuo-spatial Mental Model and Program…
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…
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…
Novice programmers often struggle to understand how code executes and to form the abstract mental models necessary for effective problem-solving, challenges that are amplified in large, diverse introductory courses where students'…
Software visualizations are usually realized as standalone and isolated tools that use embedded code viewers within the visualization. In the context of program comprehension, only few approaches integrate visualizations into code editors,…
Software visualization can be of great use for understanding and exploring a software system in an intuitive manner. Spatial representation of software is a promising approach of increasing interest. However, little is known about how…
In code comprehension experiments, participants are usually told at the beginning what kind of code comprehension task to expect. Describing experiment scenarios and experimental tasks will influence participants in ways that are sometimes…
This paper represents a pilot study examining learners who are new to computer science (CS). Subjects are taught to program in one of two virtual reality (VR) applications developed by the researcher that use interactable objects…
Software is intangible and knowledge about software systems is typically tacit. The mental model of software developers is thus an important factor in software engineering. It is our vision that developers should be able to refer to code as…
Measuring code understandability is both highly relevant and exceptionally challenging. This paper proposes a dynamic code understandability assessment method, which estimates a personalized code understandability score from the perspective…
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…
This paper proposes an open source visual analytics tool consisting of several views and perspectives on eye movement data collected during code reading tasks when writing computer programs. Hence the focus of this work is on code and…
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…
Context: Software engineering is becoming more and more distributed. Developers and other stakeholders are often located in different locations, departments, and countries and operating within different time zones. Most online software…
A Space-Time Cube enables analysts to clearly observe spatio-temporal features in movement trajectory datasets in geovisualization. However, its general usability is impacted by a lack of depth cues, a reported steep learning curve, and the…
Generative AI agents are reshaping human-computer interaction, shifting users from direct task execution to supervising machine-driven actions, especially the rise of "vibe coding" in programming. Yet little is known about how screen reader…
Understanding how novices reason about coding at a neurological level has implications for training the next generation of software engineers. In recent years, medical imaging has been increasingly employed to investigate patterns of neural…
Visual-spatial understanding, the ability to infer object relationships and layouts from visual input, is fundamental to downstream tasks such as robotic navigation and embodied interaction. However, existing methods face spatial…
Problem-driven visualization work is rooted in deeply understanding the data, actors, processes, and workflows of a target domain. However, an individual's personality traits and cognitive abilities may also influence visualization use.…
The visualization of a network influences the quality of the mental map that the viewer develops to understand the network. In this study, we investigate the effects of a 3D immersive visualization environment compared to a traditional 2D…
Our goal is to identify brain regions involved in comprehending computer programs. We use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate two candidate systems of brain regions which may support this -- the Multiple Demand (MD)…