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                DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE
                  COLORADO STATE UNIVERSITY

                          BARNEY'S
                 MONDAY AFTERNOON CLUB SEMINAR

		Speaker:  A. Marie Vans
			  Computer Science Department
			  Colorado State University

		   Date:  Monday, March 3, 1997
		   Time:  3:30 - 4:30 p.m.
		  Place:  100 USC

	       Refreshments:  following the talk

		   Host:  Anneliese von Mayrhauser
			  avm@cs.colostate.edu

              A MULTI-LEVEL CODE COMPREHENSION MODEL
                    FOR LARGE-SCALE SOFTWARE

For the past 20 years researchers have studied how programmers 
go about understanding code they did not write. Most of this 
research has concentrated on small-scale code understanding. 
We consider it necessary to design studies that observe 
programmers working on large-scale code in production envi-
ronments. We describe the design and implementation of such
a study which included 11 maintenance engineers working on 
various maintenance tasks.

I will present results of observing professional maintenance 
engineers working with industrial code at actual maintenance 
tasks.  Protocol analysis is used to explore how code under- 
standing might differ for small- versus large-scale code. 
The experiment confirms that cognition processes work at all 
levels of abstraction simultaneously as programmers build a
mental model of the code.  Analysis focused on dynamic 
properties and processes of code understanding.

Cognition processes emerged at three levels of aggregation 
representing lower and higher level strategies of understand-
ing.  They show differences in what triggers them and how 
they achieve their goals.

A better grasp of how programmers understand large scale code 
and what is most efficient and effective can lead to better 
tools, better maintenance guidelines, and better
documentation.