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A Brief Summary of Cognitive Patterns for Program Comprehension
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Empirical Software Engineering
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This paper presents a research approach applied to the development of "cognitive patterns" in software comprehension. The approach involves observation of professionals in the field and the analysis of the resulting data. It is a "mixed methods" approach since it combines elements of specific research methods used in software engineering empirical research, and sociological qualitative research-specifically an approach called "grounded theory". We apply our combined approach to develop the basis for a theory of the ways people think when explaining and comprehending software. We have called the result "cognitive patterns". The approach involves videotaping of whiteboard activities as professional software engineers explain software, iterative coding of the video data, qualitative and quantitative analysis of the results, and generation of cognitive patterns from the categories.