Hi there,
A month or so ago, I posted the following request for help:
> Anyone know of software comprehension experiments which used
> 'programmers' overview descriptions of the system' as a measure of
> comprehension.
Thanks to all the PPIGers who took the trouble to point me in the right
direction. Heres a summary of their suggestions (just in case anyone has
the same querky 'indexing' requirements as myself!)
Judith Good's Doctoral Thesis
http://www.hcrc.ed.ac.uk/~judithg/thesis.html
Specifically chapter 8 is an indepth discussion of a summary analysis
technique;
Chapter 9 shows an example of this analysis;
It in turn refers to Pennington's and Corritores and Weidenbecks use of
the summary technique:
Pennington, N. (1987)
Comprehension Strategies in Programming. In Empirical Studies of
Programmers: Second Workshop, G. M. Olson, S. Sheppard, and E. Soloway,
eds. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. p. 100-113.
Corritore, C. L. & S. Wiedenbeck (1991)
What Do Novices Learn During Program Comprehension? International
Journal of
Human-Computer Interaction, vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 199-222.
Other relevant articles which people pointed out included drawings as
summaries and informal observational studies:
M. Petre and A.F. Blackwell. A Glimpse of Expert Programmers' Mental
Imagery.
in 7th Workshop on Empirical Studies of Programmers. 1997. Alexandria
VA: ACM
Press.
Elisa L.A. Baniassad and Gail C. Murphy. Conceptual Module Querying for
Software Reengineering. ICSE '20, April 1998.
Gail C. Murphy and David Notkin. Reengineering with Reflexion Models: A
Case Study. Computer 30, 8, pp. 29-36
http://www.cs.umd.edu/~sharip/wess/papers/singer.html
ust-In-Time-Comprehension vs. the Full-Coverage Strategy : A paper by J.
Singer and T. Lethbridge presented at WESS 98
Many thanks,
Jim
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