The area of program comprehension comprises a vast body of literature, with numerous
conflicting models having been proposed. Models are typically grounded in experimental …

Context: Programmers' mental models represent their knowledge and understanding of
programs, programming concepts, and programming in general. They guide programmers' …

Background: Developers spend a lot of their time on understanding source code. Static code
analysis tools can draw attention to code that is difficult for developers to understand …

Previous studies have reported mixed results regarding the relationship between students'
use of self-regulated learning (SRL) strategies and their performance in introductory …

The relevance of code comprehension in a developer's daily work was recognized more
than 40 years ago. Consequently, many experiments were conducted to find out how …

Key class identification approaches aim at identifying the most important classes to help
developers, especially newcomers, start the software comprehension process. So far, many …

Modern programming frequently requires the use of APIs (Application Programming
Interfaces). Yet many programmers struggle when trying to learn APIs. We ran an …

Static code analysis tools and integrated development environments present developers
with quality-related software metrics, some of which describe the understandability of source …

Recent studies have empirically validated the existence of small patterns in C code, named
atoms of confusion (or atoms for short), that can interfere with program comprehension. The …

Context Feature location is the task of finding the source code that implements specific
functionality in software systems. A common approach is to leverage textual information in …