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@InProceedings{Latoza2007,
AUTHOR = {LaToza, Thomas and Garlan, David and Herbsleb, James and Myers, Brad},
TITLE = {Program Comprehension as Fact Finding},
YEAR = {2007},
MONTH = {3-7 September},
BOOKTITLE = {Proceedings of the 6th Joint Meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE 2007)},
PAGES = {361-370},
ADDRESS = {Dubrovnik, Croatia},
PDF = {http://acme.able.cs.cmu.edu/pubs/uploads/pdf/fp242-latoza.pdf},
ABSTRACT = {Little is known about how developers think about design during
code modification tasks or how experienced developers’ design
knowledge helps them work more effectively. We performed a lab
study in which thirteen developers worked for 3 hours understanding
the design of a 54 KLOC open source application. Participants
had from 0 to 10.5 years of industry experience and were
grouped into three “experts” and ten “novices.” We observed that
participants spent their time seeking, learning, critiquing, explaining,
proposing, and implementing facts about the code such as
“getFoldLevel has effects”. These facts served numerous roles,
such as suggesting changes, constraining changes, and predicting
the amount of additional investigation necessary to make a
change. Differences between experts and novices included that
the experts explained the root cause of the design problem and
made changes to address it, while novice changes addressed only
the symptoms. Experts did not read more methods but also did not
visit some methods novices wasted time understanding. Experts
talked about code in terms of abstractions such as “caching” while
novices more often described code statement by statement. Experts
were able to implement a change faster than novices. Experts
perceived problems novices did not and were able to explain
facts novices could not. These findings have interesting implications
for future tools.},
NOTE = {Available from the ACM Digital Library: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1287624.1287675},
KEYWORDS = {Software Architecture}
}
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