The mythical man-month (anniversary ed.)
The mythical man-month (anniversary ed.)
Experimental investigations of the utility of detailed flowcharts in programming
Communications of the ACM
The effects of structured, multi-level documentation
CHI '86 Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
A design tool used to quantitatively evaluate student projects
SIGCSE '88 Proceedings of the nineteenth SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education
SIGCSE '88 Proceedings of the nineteenth SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education
Software engineerng applied to discrete event simulations
WSC '86 Proceedings of the 18th conference on Winter simulation
Survey of empirical studies of graphical representations for algorithms
CSC '88 Proceedings of the 1988 ACM sixteenth annual conference on Computer science
Control flow and data structure documentation: two experiments
Communications of the ACM
Documentation of concurrent programs
CHI '83 Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
A review of human factors research on programming languages and specifications
CHI '82 Proceedings of the 1982 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Fifteen years of psychology in software engineering: Individual differences and cognitive science
ICSE '84 Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Software engineering
A theory of small program complexity
ACM SIGPLAN Notices
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Seventy-two participants were presented with specifications for each of three modular-sized computer programs. Nine different specification formats were prepared for each program. These formats varied along two dimensions: type of symbology and spatial arrangement. The type of symbology included natural language, constrained language (PDL), and ideograms (flowchart symbols). The spatial arrangement included sequential, branching, and hierarchical versions. The participants answered a series of comprehension questions on each program using only the program specifications. Three types of questions were presented: forward-tracing, backward-tracing, and input-output. Both forward- and backward-tracing questions were answered more quickly from specifications presented in PDL or ideograms than in natural language. Forward-tracing questions were answered most quickly from a branching arrangement, and backward-tracing questions were answered more quickly from branching and hierarchical arrangements. Response times to the input-output questions did not vary significantly as a function of the type of symbology or the spatial arrangement.