[Journal First] Measuring Program Comprehension: A Large-Scale Field Study with Professionals
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper is published in IEEE Transaction on Software Engineering (DOI: 10.1109/TSE.2017.2734091). Comparing with previous programming comprehension studies that are usually in controlled settings or have a small number of participants, we perform a more realistic investigation of program comprehension activities. To do this, we extend our ActivitySpace framework to collect and analyze Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) data across many applications (not just the IDEs). We collect 3,148 working hour data from 78 professional developers in a field study. We follow Minelli et al.'s approach to assign developers' activities into four categories: navigation, editing, comprehension, and other. Then we measure comprehension time by calculating the time that developers spend on program comprehension. We find that on average developers spend ~58% of their time on program comprehension activities, and that they frequently use web browsers and document editors to perform program comprehension activities. We also investigate the impact of programming language, developers' experience, and project phase on the time that is spent on program comprehension.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it