Object-oriented program comprehension during software maintenance

Amela Karahasanovich

Simula Research Laboratory, Norway

http://www.simula.no/portal_memberdata/amela

Friday, 19 August 2005, 11:00am

Seminar room 1.24

Abstract. Program comprehension is a prerequisite for several software engineering tasks like maintenance, reengineering and debugging and is therefore one of the central topics in software engineering. Understanding of the underlying processes of program comprehension is a sine qua non for the development of tools, documentation and guidelines that support the cognitive processes of programmers in an appropriate manner and thus improve software development.

In this talk I shall discuss the research conducted at Simula RL and UWA on program comprehension during software maintenance. We have conducted three controlled experiments with in total 73 students from the University of Oslo, Oslo University College and UWA and 24 professional developers from Norwegian IT industry. Each experiment lasted six hours and the participants conducted three maintenance tasks on a medium size Java application using professional development tools. We collected data on the experiment participants, their strategies and problems they had by the means of the Simula Experiment Support Environment (SESE) developed at Simula RL and logged their actions by the Generic Remote Usage Measurement Production Systems (GRUMPS) developed at the University of Glasgow.

During the talk I shall describe how these technologies enabled us to reveal comprehension strategies used by programmers, effects of these strategies on their performance and difficulties they had while conducting maintenance tasks in the object-oriented paradigm. I shall also discuss possible consequences of this research for maintaining of object-oriented systems in industry and teaching of object-oriented languages at universities. 

Amela Karahasanovich is a postdoctoral fellow in the Software Engineering Department at Simula Research Laboratory and an associate professor in the Department of Informatics at the University of Oslo, Norway. The Software Engineering Department at Simula RL is internationally recognized as one of the leading groups in empirical software engineering. The main goal of the research conducted in this department is to extend empirically-based knowledge about the effects of different models, methods and techniques, and thus support IT industry in developing better IT-systems using fewer resources Amela’s research interests include research methods in empirical software engineering, software comprehension, and object-oriented analysis and design. She has also nine years industrial experience as system developer and project manager.