Moving Towards Program Comprehension in Software Development: A Case Study

The goal of this paper aims at promoting program comprehension in computer science, in particular software engineering and object-oriented programming courses. The research methodology is evaluated through an empirical study which involves an active participation audience of undergraduate and graduate computer science students. With no previous knowledge on program comprehension, participants were explicitly instructed to use their computing skills and own strategies to comprehend a set of Java programs of different difficulty levels. We did not impose on the participants any specific paradigm to comprehend the source code. We conducted three case studies with two groups of students, and the results were promising, despite of the fact that students had no previous knowledge of program comprehension. The results of this study shows that participants identified four dimensions to comprehend the source code - namely input/output activities, visual scanning, computer science knowledge, and application domain. In addition, the results provided strong evidence for the validation of the hypotheses that we formulated earlier before conducting the case studies. Another factor worth mentioning is the indentation of the code which might play a role in debugging.