Source Code Comprehension: A Contemporary Definition and Conceptual Model for Empirical Investigation
Marvin Wyrich

TL;DR
This paper defines source code comprehension as a clear concept and proposes a conceptual model to standardize empirical research in the field, addressing current inconsistencies.
Contribution
It provides a formal definition and a conceptual framework for source code comprehension to improve research consistency and validity.
Findings
Defines source code comprehension as a distinct concept.
Proposes a conceptual model for empirical investigation.
Addresses issues of construct validity in code comprehension research.
Abstract
Be it in debugging, testing, code review or, more recently, pair programming with AI assistance: in all these activities, software engineers need to understand source code. Accordingly, plenty of research is taking place in the field to find out, for example, what makes code easy to understand and which tools can best support developers in their comprehension process. And while any code comprehension researcher certainly has a rough idea of what they mean when they mention a developer having a good understanding of a piece of code, to date, the research community has not managed to define source code comprehension as a concept. Instead, in primary research on code comprehension, an implicit definition by task prevails, i.e., code comprehension is what the experimental tasks measure. This approach has two negative consequences. First, it makes it difficult to conduct secondary research.…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsSoftware Engineering Research · Software Engineering Techniques and Practices · Software Reliability and Analysis Research
