Programmers are frequently tasked with modifying, enhancing, and extending applications.
To perform these tasks, programmers must understand existing code by forming mental …

The field of software, has, to date, focused almost exclusively on application-independent
approaches. In this research, we demonstrate the role of application domain knowledge in …

As part of a study on the recall of skilled and novice programmers, 23 subjects each viewed
a 25-line BASIC program organized in one of three ways, executable order, random chunks …

A sufficiency theory is presented of the process by which a computer programmer attempts
to comprehend a program. The theory is intended to explain four sources of variation in …

Three experiments were conducted to test the role that semantic knowledge plays in expert
programmer ability. In Experiments 1 and 2, changing the normal semantic structure affected …

Plans are underlying cognitive structures used by programmers to represent code. In two
studies we examined the content of plan-based representations and sought to show that …

This study analyzes object-oriented (OO) program comprehension by experts and novices.
We examine the effect of expertise in three dimensions of comprehension strategies: the …

We present results of observing professional maintenance engineers working with industrial
code at actual maintenance tasks. Protocol analysis is used to explore how code …

We report the results of an empirical study comparing user comprehension of object oriented
(OO) and process oriented (PO) models. The fundamental difference is that while OO …

This chapter considers an alternative to the 'programming plan'view of programming
expertise, namely that expert programmers have a much wider repertoire of strategies …