%0 Conference Paper %1 citeulike:217190 %A A, M. D. %A Fracchia, F. D. %A Mueller, H. A. %B WPC '97: Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Program Comprehension (WPC '97) %C Washington, DC, USA %D 1997 %I IEEE Computer Society %K modeling se seoss %T Cognitive Design Elements to Support the Construction of a Mental Model during Software Visualization %U http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=837868 %@ 081867993X

@inproceedings{citeulike:217190, added-at = {2007-06-22T20:46:40.000+0200}, address = {Washington, DC, USA}, author = {A, M. D. and Fracchia, F. D. and Mueller, H. A.}, biburl = {https://www.bibsonomy.org/bibtex/21ecc1d5eccfe4034eeb931ba6cf3ced6/jenhork}, booktitle = {WPC '97: Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Program Comprehension (WPC '97)}, citeulike-article-id = {217190}, comment = {• Understanding programs is a time consuming and important task • Reverse engineering, extracting design information from source code, as been introduced to aid program comprehension • 3 basic activities in reverse engineering process [Tilley et al.] o Data gathering o Knowledge organization – organizing data by creation abstraction s for efficient storage and retrieval o Information exploration – navigation analysis and presentation • Tools for information exploration o Graphical representations o Dynamic execution o Textual representations • Software exploration tools: graphical representations of static software structures linked to textual views • How to design and empirically validate the effectiveness of such tools? • By studying programs, people have cognitive theories • A visualization is coherent if it allows the construction of a mental model • Local coherence vs. global coherence • A hierarchy of cognitive issues to guide the development of software exploration tools is created, this is based on a similar hierarchy made for hypermedia documents • Cognitive models of program comprehension o Bottom-up: reading code then chunking together o Top-down: mapping code to knowledge of the domain. Use beacons to verify hypothesis about the program. o Expert programmers use two types of programming knowledge for comprehension:  Programming plans- typical code structures  Rules of programming discourse – conventions • Knowledge-based understanding model: programmers are opportunistic processors using a: knowledge base, mental model, and assimilation process. • Systematic and as-needed program understanding strategies o Micro strategies: read, question, conjecture, and search o Macro strategies: more global level  Systematic macro strategies: read all code and documentation systematically  As-needed macro strategies: study only relevant areas of the code • Integrated meta-model of program comprehension: o Top-down (domain) model o Program model- control flow abstraction o Situation model- data flow and functional abstractions o Knowledge base • Differences in program comprehension models are due to differences in factors which influence the comprehension process • A software exploration tool should take these factors into account • Introduces cognitive design elements to aid in tool development in two branches, one for comprehension strategies, the other for cognitive overhead. • Branch 1: comprehension strategies • Bottom-up strategies o E1: Indicate syntactic and semantic relations between software objects o E2: Reduce the effect of delocalized plans o E3: Provide abstraction mechanisms • Top-down strategies o E4: Support goal-directed, hypothesis-driven comprehension o E5: Provide overviews of the system architecture at various levels of abstraction • Both o E6: Support the construction of multiple mental models o E7: Cross reference mental models • Cognitive overhead • Facilitating navigation o E8: Provide directional navigation o E9: Support arbitrary navigation • Provide orientation cues o E10: Indicate the maintainer’s current focus o E11: Show the path that lead to the current focus o E12: Indicate options for further exploration • Reduce disorientation o E13: Reduce additional effort for user-interface adjustment o E14: Provide effective presentation styles • They added new features to SHRiMP tool to reflect this framework • Performed empirical tests on SHRiMP and other tools to validate the framework, positive results. • This is primarily a model based comprehension technique. There could also be corpus, statistical based techniques.}, description = {Citeulike 06/22/07}, interhash = {f8a8693358eba7b5c9dee71bacb263bc}, intrahash = {1ecc1d5eccfe4034eeb931ba6cf3ced6}, isbn = {081867993X}, keywords = {modeling se seoss}, priority = {0}, publisher = {IEEE Computer Society}, timestamp = {2007-06-22T20:46:40.000+0200}, title = {Cognitive Design Elements to Support the Construction of a Mental Model during Software Visualization}, url = {http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=837868}, year = 1997 }