The goal of this research was to assess the consistency of source code comprehension
strategies and comprehension effort estimation metrics, such as LOC, across different types …

Programmers performing a change task must understand the existing software in addition to
performing the actual change. This process is likely to be affected by characteristics of the …

Developers often need to find answers to questions regarding the evolution of a system
when working on its code base. While their information needs require data analysis …

Context It has been often argued that it is challenging to modify code fragments from existing
software that contains files that are difficult to comprehend. Since systematic software …

When performing a software change task, programmers expend substantial effort
investigating a system's code base to find and understand just the code that is pertinent to a …

There are a number of empirical studies that assess the benefit deriving from the use of
documentation and models in the execution of maintenance tasks. The greater part of these …

Software maintenance tasks typically involve an important amount of program investigation
effort on the part of software developers. To what extent can we benefit from prior program …

This paper reports on an empirical strategy of software understanding during corrective
maintenance of large-scale software with professional maintenance programmers …

Software maintenance can consume up to 70% of the effort spent on a software project, with
more than half of this devoted to understanding the system. Performing a software inspection …

In this paper, we present the results of a controlled experiment conducted to assess whether
the presence of unreachable methods in source code affects source code comprehensibility …