Individual differences in program comprehension strategies in unfamiliar programming systems
Amy J. Ko, Bob Uttl · 2003
This study examines the effect of individual differences on the program comprehension strategies of users working with an unfamiliar programming system. Participants of varying programming expertise were given a battery of psychological tests, a brief introduction to a statistical programming environment, and a 20-minute debugging task. Our data show three distinct comprehension strategies that were related to programming experience, but individuals with stronger domain knowledge for specific bugs tended to succeed.