Program understanding is a very important part of the testing and maintenance phases of the programming projects. The overall program knowledge, understanding the various parts of the program, and how they communicate are key steps in understanding the program. Hence data communication among modules contributes much to program complexity and...
Quickersort, Straight Insertion Sort, Mehlhorn's AVL-tree Sorting Algorithm and Cook's new sorting algorithm are compared on nearly and nedium sorted lists. The ratio of the minimum number of list elements that must be removed so that the remaining portion of the list is in order to the size of the...
Programming style is important for program understanding in programming tasks such as maintenance. testing, and debugging. The goal of programming style is to improve the readability of the source program without adversely affecting its performance.
Critique is a FORTRAN source program style critic which analyzes the source program and outputs...
This paper reports the findings of two studies conducted at Oregon State University. The first set of studies compares use of header comments versus mnemonic procedure and function names by programmers performing tasks relating to modification tasks. The second study compares the use of header comments versus in-line comments when...
This study examined the UNIX command abbreviation schemes preferred by expert and novice UNIX programmers. The two parts of the conducted experiment were: subjective rating of UNIX command abbreviations for each of the six abbreviation categories (acronym, combination, contraction, identity, synonym, and truncation); subjects suggested descriptive command names for UNDC...
FORTRAN permits both explicit and implicit options for both data declaration and type conversion features. This study investigated the effects of explicit and implicit data declaration and type conversion features on a program comprehension task performed by FORTRAN programmers in an introductory programming course. The results indicated that both factors...
Many studies have shown that expert programmers are more effective at debugging programs than novice programmers. These studies have suggested that the major reason for this difference is due to the experts' superior comprehension of the program. This paper reports two experiments which investigated expert and novice student programmers program...
There is disagreement about the role and importance of typographic style (source code formatting and commenting) in program comprehension. Results from experiments and opinions in programming style books are mixed.
This paper presents principles of typographic style consistent and compatible with the results of program comprehension studies. It introduces the...
This paper presents the results of a controlled experiment comparing debugging abilities of novice, intermediate and skilled student programmers. Debugging performance differences were studied using two single-page Pascal programs: a binary search program and a median calculation program. Two types of semantic errors, array bounds and undefined variable, and two...