Direction and Scope of Comprehension-Related Activities by Procedural and Object-Oriented Programmers: An Empirical Study

Authors:
Cynthia L. Corritore;Susan Wiedenbeck
Affiliations:
-;-
Venue:
IWPC '00 Proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Program Comprehension
Year:
2000

Citing 0
Cited 6

A Review of Experimental Investigations into Object-Oriented Technology

Empirical Software Engineering
A user-centred approach to functions in Excel

ICFP '03 Proceedings of the eighth ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming
How Effective Developers Investigate Source Code: An Exploratory Study

IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Observations of student competency in a CS1 course

ACE '05 Proceedings of the 7th Australasian conference on Computing education - Volume 42
Comprehension strategies and difficulties in maintaining object-oriented systems: An explorative study

Journal of Systems and Software
Assessing the influence of import-coupling on OCL expression maintainability: A cognitive theory-based perspective

Information Sciences: an International Journal

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

This study examines the direction and scope of comprehension-related activities of professional programmers carrying out several comprehension and maintenance activities over time. Procedural and object-oriented (OO) programmers studied a program and subsequently performed modifications during two sessions. Results showed that the OO programmers tended to use a strongly top-down approach to program understanding during an early phase of study of the program but increasingly used a bottom-up approach during the maintenance tasks. The procedural programmers used a more bottom-up orientation throughout all activities. The scope of the activities was greater for the procedural than for the OO programmers. However, regardless of paradigm, the programmers over time built a broad, rather than a localized, view of the program.