Report on a Field Experiment of the Comprehension Strategies of Computer Science MSc Students

Program comprehension takes up a significant amount of the average developer's work time. Most development tasks require broad understanding of the code base. Modern integrated development environments (IDEs) possess a basic program comprehension toolset, but the primary goal of such tools is supporting program development, not comprehension. Standalone or built-in code comprehension tools provide a wider function set. Such tools could be especially important for junior programmers who lack experience with understanding large foreign codebase. In this paper, we describe an experiment we conducted with the participation of a group of Computer Science MSc students. The participants were given a simple programming task to solve which required understanding the software they modified. The students used CodeCompass, an open-source comprehension framework. During the experiment we collected various data on the students' comprehension strate-gies. We compare the results to previous comprehension models, considering the amount of programming experience and feedback from students.