Structured flowcharts outperform pseudocode across five measures: an experimental comparison
David A. Scanlan · Proceedings of the 17th conference on ACM Annual Computer Science Conference · 1989
The results of this experiment show a clear advantage for structured flowcharts over pseudocode for the comprehension of conditional logic. The goal of this experiment was to do the most highly controlled study ever done on the utility of structured flowcharts. This experiment represents two years of effort. Eighty-two intermediate-level programmers served as subjects. The design used repeated measures across all variables. Three algorithms were chosen as test stimuli. The algorithms represented three levels of complexity: simple, medium, and complex. The pseudocoded algorithms took 1.7, 1.9, and 2.5 times longer to comprehend for the simple, medium, and complex algorithms, respectively. These three ratios significantly differed from 0. The ratios 1.7 and 1.9 did not differ significantly from each other, but did differ from 2.5.