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

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 …

Recent studies in the literature have shown that syntax remains a significant barrier to
novice computer science students in the field. While this syntax barrier is known to exist …

Program comprehension is an important cognitive process that inherently eludes direct
measurement. Thus, researchers are struggling with providing suitable programming …

Mobile developers face unique challenges when detecting and reporting crashes in apps
due to their prevailing GUI event-driven nature and additional sources of inputs (eg, sensor …

Empirical studies, often in the form of controlled experiments, have been widely adopted in
software engineering research as a way to evaluate the merits of new software engineering …

Although version control systems allow developers to describe and explain the rationale
behind code changes in commit messages, the state of practice indicates that most of the …

Recruiting professional programmers in sufficient numbers for research studies can be
challenging because they often cannot spare the time, or due to their geographical …

Reliably recruiting participants with programming skills is an ongoing challenge for empirical
studies involving software development technologies, often leading to the use of …

Programming experience is an important confounding parameter in controlled experiments
regarding program comprehension. In literature, ways to measure or control programming …