An empirical approach to understand the role of emotions in code comprehension

Abstract

Programming and cognitive skills are two pivotal abilities of programmers to maintain software products. First, this study included a systematic literature review on code comprehension, emotions, cognitive psychology, and belief-desire-intention domains to analyse various code comprehension monitoring techniques, performance metrics, and computational methodologies. Second, a case study is conducted to examine the influence of various emotional stages on programmers’ programming and cognitive skills while comprehending the software code. The categorization of the participants is done empirically based on their expertism level, and the same results are verified using various machine learning models and performance metrics.