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' …

Context Code smells are indicators of poor coding and design choices that can cause
problems during software maintenance and evolution. Objective This study is aimed at a …

Skilled workers are crucial to the success of software development. The current practice in
research and industry for assessing programming skills is mostly to use proxy variables of …

This study describes the most relevant problems and solutions found in the literature on
teaching and learning of object-oriented programming (OOP). The identification of the …

Context: The authors wanted to assess whether the quality of published human-centric
software engineering experiments was improving. This required a reliable means of …

The skills of software developers are important to the success of software projects. Also,
when studying the general effect of a tool or method, it is important to control for individual …

Context: The authors wanted to assess whether the quality of published human-centric
software engineering experiments was improving. This required a reliable means of …

This paper reports an explorative experimental comparison of (i) an experience-sampling
method called feedback collection and (ii) the think-aloud methods with respect to their …

As a developer works on a change task, he or she might perceive some parts of the task as
easy and other parts as being very difficult. Currently, little is known about when a developer …