Supporting Code Comprehension via Annotations: Right Information at the Right Time and Place

Code comprehension, especially understanding relationships across project elements (code, documentation, etc.), is non-trivial when information is spread across different interfaces and tools. Bringing the right amount of information, to the place where it is relevant and when it is needed can help reduce the costs of seeking information and creating mental models of the code relationships. While non-traditional IDEs have tried to mitigate these costs by allowing users to spatially place relevant information together, thus far, no study has examined the effects of these non-traditional interactions on code comprehension. Here, we present an empirical study to investigate how the right information at the right time and right place allows users—especially newcomers—to reduce the costs of code comprehension. We use a non-traditional IDE, called Synectic, and implement link-able annotations which provide affordances for the accuracy, time, and space dimensions. We conducted a between-subjects user study of 22 newcomers performing code comprehension tasks using either Synectic or a traditional IDE, Eclipse. We found that having the right information at the right time and place leads to increased accuracy and reduced cognitive load during code comprehension tasks, without sacrificing the usability of developer tools.

I. Introduction

Code comprehension is essential to software developement and comprises a large portion of developers’ activities. For example, in a field study, Xia et al. found that software professionals spent 58% of their development efforts on code comprehension [1]. Given the large role that code comprehension plays, research has sought to map the processes through which developers understand a code base. For instance, Sillito et al. identified four categories of questions developers ask during maintenance tasks [2], which map to the code comprehension processes of: find an initial focus point, expand understanding around that point, and understand the concepts that connect related code entities, and build a mental model of multiple groups of related entities.