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May 1, 2005
"Expert Problem Solving Strategies For Program Comprehension" by Jurgen Koenemann and Scott P. Robertson
This paper studies the problem stategies that expert programmers use to solve a Pascal problem. The study consisted of 12 subjects, all of whom had 4 to 15 years of experience, had 4 years of Pascal experience, and have worked on a large project. Each subject was given a program and a list of 4 modification task descriptions for the program and they would have to describe how they would accomplish each task. Then they were randomly given one of the 4 tasks to complete and were asked to think aloud as well as verbalize and explain any requests for information.
Through this experiment they discovered that none of the subjects ever studied more than half of the code for the modification phase. The experimenters referred to this phenomenon as relevance strategy wherein subjects only study code or documents that they feel are relevant for the task. Furthermore some procedures were ignored by all subjects such as min, max, and isdigit. The experimenters concluded that the subjects spent most of their time searching for code segments that were relevant to their task and ignored parts of the program that either they were familiar with or had no relevance.
This is important for our studying because when we assign our experts a task we should observe not just what the expert does, but what he doesn't do to understand the problem presented to him. Until reading this paper it didn't occur to me to record things he doesn't do like reading all of the program. Just another trait of experts to keep in mind.
Posted by Teerawat at May 1, 2005 5:30 PM
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