Do visualizations improve program comprehensibility? experiments with control structure diagrams for Java

Authors:
T. Dean Hendrix;James H. Cross, II;Saeed Maghsoodloo;Matthew L. McKinney
Affiliations:
Computer Science and Software Engineering, Auburn University, AL;Computer Science and Software Engineering, Auburn University, AL;Industrial and Systems Engineering, Auburn University, AL;Computer Science and Software Engineering, Auburn University, AL
Venue:
Proceedings of the thirty-first SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education
Year:
2000

Citing 4
Cited 10

Programming in Ada (2nd ed.)

Programming in Ada (2nd ed.)
Experimental evaluation of software documentation formats

Journal of Systems and Software
Visual support for incremental abstraction and refinement in Ada 95

Proceedings of the 1998 annual ACM SIGAda international conference on Ada
The Control Structure Diagram: An Overview and InitialEvaluation

Empirical Software Engineering

Software visualization in software maintenance, reverse engineering, and re-engineering: a research survey

Journal of Software Maintenance: Research and Practice
A Java 3D implementation of a geon based visualisation tool for UML

PPPJ '03 Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on Principles and practice of programming in Java
CS1 assessment using memory diagrams

Proceedings of the 35th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education
Core empirical concepts and skills for computer science

Proceedings of the 35th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education
Reviewing Software Diagrams: A Cognitive Study

IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
An empirical validation of complexity profile graph

Proceedings of the 43rd annual Southeast regional conference - Volume 1
An iterative methodology for teaching object oriented concepts

Informatics in education
Do visualizations improve synchronous remote collaboration?

Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Breaking the barriers to successful refactoring: observations and tools for extract method

Proceedings of the 30th international conference on Software engineering
Automated construction of memory diagrams for program comprehension

Proceedings of the 48th Annual Southeast Regional Conference

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Recently, the first in a series of planned comprehension experiments was performed to measure the effect of the control structure diagram (CSD) on program comprehensibility. Upper-division computer science students were asked to respond to questions regarding the structure and execution of a source code module written in Java. Statistical analysis of the data collected from this experiment revealed that the CSD was highly significant in enhancing the subjects' performance in this program comprehension task. The results of this initial experiment along with the planned follow-on experiments promise to shed light on fundamental questions regarding the effect of software visualizations on program comprehensibility.