Effects of Explicit Feature Traceability on Program Comprehension.

One main novelty of this paper is the experimental design where the program comprehension tasks are prepared to require deeper thought processes, which take place in developers’ working memory.

ABSTRACT: Developers spend a substantial amount of their time with program comprehension. To improve their comprehension and refresh their memory, developers need to communicate with other developers, read the documentation, and analyze the source code. Many studies show that developers focus primarily on the source code and that small improvements can have a strong impact. As such, it is crucial to bring the code itself into a more comprehensible form. A particular technique for this purpose are explicit feature traces to easily identify a program’s functionalities. To improve our empirical understanding about the effect of feature traces, we report an online experiment with 49 professional software developers. We studied the impact of explicit feature traces, namely annotations and decomposition, on program comprehension and compared them to the same code without traces. Besides this experiment, we also asked our participants about their opinions in order to combine quantitative and qualitative data. Our results indicate that, as opposed to purely object-oriented code: (1) annotations can have positive effects on program comprehension; (2) decomposition can have negative impact on bug localization; and (3) both techniques are considered beneficial. Moreover, none of the three code versions yields significant improvements on task completion time. Overall, our results indicate that lightweight traceability, such as using annotations, provides developers immediate benefits during software development without extensive training or tooling; and can improve current industrial practices that rely on heavyweight traceability tools (e.g., DOORS) and retroactive fulfillment of standards (e.g., ISO-26262, DO-178B).

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Recommended citation: Jacob Krüger, Gül Çalikli, Thorsten Berger, Thomas Leich, Gunter Saake. (2019). "Effects of Explicit Feature Traceability on Program Comprehension." Proceedings of The 27th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE). 338-349.