R. Brooks. Towards a theory of the comprehension of computer programs. International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, 18:543--554, 1983.  Home/Search   Document Not in Database   Summary   Related Articles   Check

....not found any comparable research speci cally on human type checking. However, there are interesting correspondences with work on program comprehension. In particular, the observed use of type skeletons to guide type checking may be an instance of Brooks top down, hypothesis driven comprehension [9]. Similarly, the observed use of concrete type features is similar to Wiedenbeck and Scholtz s identi cation of the use of surface beacons to guide successful program comprehension [61] Wiedenbeck and Scholz note that beacon use is particularly helpful for comprehension of programs with unknown ....

R. Brooks. Towards a theory of the comprehension of computer programs. International journal of man-machine studies, 18:543-554, 1983.

....because it is unclear what alternative program design should be used for comparison when testing the presence or absence of patterns. Why do we think that adding PCL is a useful proposition Most theories of program comprehension state that the comprehension process is driven by hypotheses [3, 13] formed and validated during the understanding process. A nice overview of this view of program comprehension can be found in [26] Further recent research papers can be found in [28, 29, 30, 31] Once a program is understood, its meaning is represented as a hierarchy of hypotheses. Without ....

....all of the information contained in the PCL is already present in the rest of the comments and is just repeated in a different form by PCL. Note that repetition as such can either improve program understanding (by useful redundancy) or slow it down (because less new information is found per line) [3]. See the conclusion section for our opinion on the present case. We compiled a list of the design information units conveyed by the PCL and counted where and how often they were mentioned in the PCL and in the other comments. Table 2: List of the design information units provided by the PCL of ....

Ruven Brooks. Towards a theory of the com- prehension of computer programs. Intl. J. of Man-Machine Studies, 18(6):543-554, June 1983.

....stumbling blocks for novices learning to program. Rather, the real problems novices have lie in putting the pieces together, composing and coordinating components of a program [35, 36] Expert programmers know a great deal more than just the syntax and semantics of language constructs (e.g. [2, 5, 13, 18, 27, 31]. They have built up large libraries of stereotypical solutions to problems as well as strategies for coordinating and composing them. Students should be taught explicitly about these libraries and strategies for using them. Teaching programming in schools is a particularly hot topic now: On the ....

Brooks, R. Towards a theory of the comprehension of computer programs. lnt. 1. Man-Mach. Stud. 18 (1983), 543-554.

....not found any comparable research specifically on human type checking. However, there are interesting correspondences with work on program comprehension. In particular, the observed use of type skeletons to guide type checking may be an instance of Brooks top down, hypothesis driven comprehension[17]. Similarly, the observed use of concrete type features is similar to Wiedenbeck and Scholz s identification of the use of surface beacons to guide successful program comprehension[18] Wiedenbeck and Scholz note that beacon use is particularly helpful for comprehension of programs with unknown ....

Brooks, R. (1983) Towards a theory of the comprehension of computer programs. International journal of man-machine studies, 18, 543--554. .

....overall search for confirmatory and conflicting evidence for the hypothesis. This portion might otherwise be performed by a manual search through the code. The overall process of using RMTool corresponds closely to a distributed (but non hierarchical) version of Brooks hypothesis binding model [1]. Only part of the complete process (i.e. the evidence search) is performed externally, and only part of the knowledge (i.e. the relevant hypotheses and argumentation evidence) is distributed onto the tool. Notice that having a model of the entire process is important to arguing the contributions ....

Brooks, R. E. Towards a theory of the comprehension of computer programs. International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, 18(6), 1983, pp. 543--554.

....managed to take into account some of the impact of artifacts on cognition. Examples of this sort of work include the foundational work by Larkin et al. on displaybased problem solving [374] and diagrammatic efficiency [115, 375] the work by Card et al. 94] on HCI modeling, and the work by Brooks [71 73, 76] on program writing and comprehension. In most of this sort of work, the external world is explicitly (but simply) treated as an external memory whose currently perceivable contents can appear in working memory. The treatment of the mechanisms involved is frequently simplistic: items stored ....

....here. There are several possible classification methods for processing that could be considered. These include: 1. Generic Domains. A frequently used method for formalizing computation is to map operations from a problem domain into operations within domain independent computational layers [76] (e.g. algebras, calculi, logics, etc. This suggests that a fruitful approach for creating a domain independent taxonomy of computational methods is to enumerate operations defining these sorts of intermediate domains (set functions, matrix calculations, graph traversals, etc. Distributing ....

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Brooks, R. E. Towards a theory of the comprehension of computer programs. International Journal of ManMachine Studies, 18(6), 1983, pp. 543--554.

....E05 E06 The client releases the semaphore by informing the Semaphore task. This pattern exists in Figure 5, where the Client task is Task Actor 433 4 . 6. 0 Comparison with Other Research This research has similarities to reverse engineering [6] software reuse [28] and program comprehension [25, 3]. Figure 8: Detecting the Potential of RPC Deadlock Task 1 E017 E287 E323 Task 2 E344 E347 1.1 RPC 1.2 Most techniques for construction models have focussed on syntax analysis or transformation of the source code of sequential programs [40, 49, 25] Program transformations with these tools ....

R. Brooks. Towards a theory of the comprehension of computer programs. International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, 18:543--554, 1983.

....maintenance cycle of a software system and its source code can be helpful in a number of tasks. A few notable examples are: Program comprehension; existing cognition models share the idea that program comprehension occurs in a bottom up manner, a top down manner, or some combination of the two [30, 6, 37, 26]. Tracing areas of code to related sections of an application domain handbook, to a set of design documents, or to manual pages, supports both top down and bottom up comprehension. In top down comprehension it provides hints on where to look for beacons that either confirm or confute a hypothesis, ....

R. Brooks. Towards a theory of the comprehension of computer programs. International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, 18:543--554, 1983.

....because it is unclear what alternative program design should be used for comparison when testing the presence or absence of patterns. Why do we think that adding PCL is a useful proposition Most theories of program comprehension state that the comprehension process is driven by hypotheses [3, 13] formed and validated during the understanding process. A nice overview of this view of program comprehension can be found in [26] Further recent research papers can be found in [28, 29, 30, 31] Once a program is understood, its meaning is represented as a hierarchy of hypotheses. Without ....

....all of the information contained in the PCL is already present in the rest of the comments and is just repeated in a di erent form by PCL. Note that repetition as such can either improve program understanding (by useful redundancy) or slow it down (because less new information is found per line) [3]. See the conclusion section for our opinion on the present case. We compiled a list of the design information units conveyed by the PCL and counted where and how often they were mentioned in the PCL and in the other comments. 8 Table 2: List of the design information units provided by the PCL ....

Ruven Brooks. Towards a theory of the comprehension of computer programs. Intl. J. of Man-Machine Studies, 18(6):543-554, June 1983.

....dependent plans appear lower. A programmer with expertise in programming in general and with expertise in Pascal programming may still have poor knowledge of spreadsheet plans. Programming involves knowledge of different domains, at least those of the programming domain and the problem domain (Brooks, 1983). The problem domain description of the programming problem represents the desired goal or decomposition of this goal into several subgoals and forms the highest level of the goal (and plan) description of the problem. The programming domain knowledge can be further divided into knowledge of ....

....The goal of all application programming is to solve some problem in an application domain, and not just to develop an application that performs some computations. It is a well known phenomenon in software engineering application domain knowledge cannot be transferred directly to programming domain (Brooks, 1983). The writing of a computer program creates just a model of the application domain data. In application programming, it is a common situation that future users of a system will be application domain experts while the design and implementation will be done by programming domain experts. The success ....

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Brooks, R. (1983). Towards a Theory of the Comprehension of Computer Programs.

....programmers ability to comprehend programs [7] This observation has prompted several researchers to investigate the processes involved in understanding programs. Of interest to this paper are works from two disparate communities: academic researchers in computer science and psychology, such as [1, 3, 18, 19], and practitioners and managers in the industry, such as [22, 23, 25] The papers [3, 18] propose theoretical models of cognitive processes involved in program understanding. These models have been subjected to experimental analysis by other researchers [9, 20] The experiments are typically ....

....to investigate the processes involved in understanding programs. Of interest to this paper are works from two disparate communities: academic researchers in computer science and psychology, such as [1, 3, 18, 19] and practitioners and managers in the industry, such as [22, 23, 25] The papers [3, 18] propose theoretical models of cognitive processes involved in program understanding. These models have been subjected to experimental analysis by other researchers [9, 20] The experiments are typically performed in controlled environments using programs under 500 lines of code. Whether the ....

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R. Brooks. Towards a theory of the comprehension of computer programs. International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, 18:543--554, 1983.

....by necessity, will be partial. Corrective maintenance is regarded as the most common activity during the life time of the program. Hypotheses , at the code, algorithmic and application domain levels, are major drivers to program understanding in the corrective maintenance activities [24, 4, 14]. Program slicing, both static [25, 8] and dynamic [13, 10, 1] is also a technique often used in maintenance activities such as comprehension, design recovery and risk migration. The technique was further used to identify functionalities [9] Determining slicing criteria [7] was achieved using ....

R. Brooks. Towards A Theory of the Comprehension of Computer Programs. Intr. Journal of Man-Machine Studies, 18, 1983.

....generalization based on a case study is of necessity limited, the results could be the basis for further experiments. They also point to information that would help novices to become experts faster. 1 Introduction Hypotheses have long been recognized as major drivers of program comprehension [3, 1]. They help to direct further investigation. Generating hypotheses about code and investigating whether they hold or must be rejected is an important facet of code understanding. Letovsky [3] defines Hypotheses as conjectures and comprehension activities (actions) that take on the order of seconds ....

....conjectures hypothesize about the method for accomplishing a program goal. What conjectures hypothesize about what something is, for example a variable or function. There are degrees of certainty associated with a conjecture. They vary from uncertain guesses to almost certain conclusions. Brooks [1] theorizes that hypotheses are the only drivers of cognition. Understanding is complete when the mental model consists entirely of a complete hierarchy of hypotheses in which the lowest level hypotheses are either verified (against actual code or documentation) or fail. At the top of this ....

[Article contains additional citation context not shown here]

Ruven Brooks, Towards a theory of the comprehension of computer programs, In: International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, 18(1983), pp. 543554.

....all of the information contained in the PCL is already present in the rest of the comments and is just repeated in a di erent form by PCL. Note that repetition as such can either improve program understanding (by useful redundancy) or slow it down (because less new information is found per line) [3]. See the conclusion section for our opinion on the present case. We compiled a list of the design information units conveyed by the PCL and counted where and how often they were mentioned in the PCL and in the other comments. For Uka And Or tree, this information is shown in the left half of ....

Ruven Brooks. Towards a theory of the comprehension of computer programs. Intl. J. of Man-Machine Studies, 18(6):543-554, June 1983.

....improve quality and efficiency of program understanding and thus maintenance. The first step in satisfying a maintenance engineer s information needs is to define a model of how programmers understand code. For years, researchers have tried to understand how programmers comprehend programs [1, 2], 8] 12, 13] 15] 16, 17] The literature provides two approaches to comprehension: cognitive models that emphasize cognition by what the program does (a functional approach) and a controlflow approach which emphasizes how the program works. Chapin s Software Maintenance Life Cycle [3] ....

....mappings from the program model in the form of lower level abstractions of actual program code. The knowledge structures in this model reflect real world knowledge that can be grouped into different domains or Pennington s plan knowledge for the situation model. The knowledge domains are Brooks [2] knowledge domains. For example, at the domain level we may have a picture of a process control block (PCB) with the types of information it might contain. At the situation model the PCB may be represented as a table. At the program model level we see a C structure and how it is used updated in ....

[Article contains additional citation context not shown here]

Ruven Brooks, Towards a theory of the comprehension of computer programs, In: International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, 18(1983), pp. 543554.

....or design choice. How conjectures hypothesize about the method for accomplishing a program goal. What conjectures hypothesize about what something is, for example a variable or function. Conjectures vary in their degree of certainty from uncertain guesses to almost certain conclusions. Brooks [1] considers hypotheses the only drivers of cognition. Understanding is complete when the mental model consists entirely of a complete hierarchy of hypotheses in which the lowest level hypotheses are either verified (against actual code or documentation) or fail. At the top is the primary ....

....it previously) So did their behavior. Hypothesis resolution was predominantly through confirmation or failure. EN1 in particular abandons only one hypothesis. It is not clear whether this is a function of his strong knowledge of the code. His behavior supports Brooks theory on hypotheses [1], although none of our other observations do [13, 15] Programmers appear to make few why hypotheses [13, 16, 17] The subjects of the present study are no exception. EN1, however, made more than the other subjects. Thus hypothesizing about why something was done might be related to the ....

Ruven Brooks, `Towards a theory of the comprehension of computer programs', International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, 18(1983), pp. 543-554.

....not found any comparable research specifically on human type checking. However, there are interesting correspondences with work on program comprehension. In particular, the observed use of type skeletons to guide type checking may be an instance of Brooks top down, hypothesis driven comprehension[3]. Similarly, the observed use of concrete type features is similar to Wiedenbeck and Scholtz s identification of the use of surface beacons to guide successful program comprehension[16] Wiedenbeck and Scholz note that beacon use is particularly helpful for comprehension of programs with unknown ....

Brooks, R. Towards a theory of the comprehension of computer programs. International journal of man-machine studies, 18, 543-- 554, 1983.

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R. Brooks. Towards a theory of the comprehension of computer programs. International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, 18:543--554, 1983.

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R. Brooks, Toward a Theory of Comprehension of Computer Programs, International Journal of ManMachine Studies, Vol. 18, No. 6, pp542-554, 1983.

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R. Brooks. Towards a theory of the comprehension of computer programs. International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, 18:543--554, 1983.

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Brooks, R. "Towards a Theory for the Comprehension of Computer Programs". International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, vol. 51, nr. 2, 197-211, 1999.

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Brooks, R. (1983). Towards a theory of the comprehension of computer programs. International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, pp543-554, June 1983.

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R. Brooks. Towards a theory of the comprehension of computer programs. Int. Journal of Man-Machine Studies, 18:543--554, 1983.

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. R. Brooks, "Towards a theory of the comprehension of computer programs." International Journal of Man-Machine Studies 18, No.6 (1983) 543-554.

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R. Brooks, "Towards a Theory of the Comprehension of Computer Programs", International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, 1983, pp. 543-554.

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