Comparing Program Comprehension of Physically and Virtually Separated Concerns

kaestner@cs.cmu.edu (J. Siegmund, C. Kästner, J. Liebig, S. Apel)
Fri, 10 Jan 2025 13:48:21 GMT

Janet Siegmund, Christian Kästner, Jörg Liebig, and Sven Apel. Comparing Program Comprehension of Physically and Virtually Separated Concerns. In Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Feature-Oriented Software Development (FOSD), ISBN 978-1-4503-1309-4, pages 17--24, New York, NY: ACM Press, September 2012.

It is common believe that separating source code along concerns or features improves program comprehension of source code. However, empirical evidence is mostly missing. In this paper, we design a controlled experiment to evaluate that believe for feature-oriented programming based on maintenance tasks with human participants. We validate our experiment with a pilot study, which already preliminarily confirms that students use different strategies to complete maintenance tasks.