How Effective Developers Investigate Source Code: An Exploratory Study
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
ACE '06 Proceedings of the 8th Australasian Conference on Computing Education - Volume 52
The SEXTANT Software Exploration Tool
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Spatial skills and navigation of source code
Proceedings of the 12th annual SIGCSE conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education
Journal of Systems and Software
The effect of task order on the maintainability of object-oriented software
Information and Software Technology
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ICSE '09 Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Software Engineering
Non-programmers identifying functionality in unfamiliar code: strategies and barriers
Journal of Visual Languages and Computing
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Proceedings of the 2010 ITiCSE working group reports
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Abstract: The purpose of this research is to examine the influence of different methods of program navigation on the mental representation and comprehension of novice procedural programmers. As a programmer tries to comprehend a program, a particular navigation method may assist or inhibit the process by highlighting, or making more accessible,certain kinds of information. Presumably, a method of navigation that highlights a certain type of information will help the programmer to better comprehend that information. In this research we study the effect of sequential, control flow, and data flow navigation methods on novices programmers' overall comprehension of a program and on the ability to comprehend specific types of information. Our results indicate that novice comprehension is facilitated by a sequential or control flow view of the program and is inhibited by a data flow view.