An Empirical Study on the Impact of Deimplicitization on Comprehension in Programs Using Application Frameworks
Name
msr20rr-deimplicit.pdf
Description
Accepted version
Size
536.48 KB
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Unknown
Checksum (MD5)
adce68943997d604769e197af43b466a
Author(s)
Cito, Jürgen
Shen, Jiasi
Rinard, Martin C
Date Issued
June 2020
Journal
Proceedings - 2020 IEEE/ACM 17th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories, MSR 2020
Publisher
ACM
Citation
Cito, Jürgen, Shen, Jiasi and Rinard, Martin. 2020. "An Empirical Study on the Impact of Deimplicitization on Comprehension in Programs Using Application Frameworks." Proceedings - 2020 IEEE/ACM 17th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories, MSR 2020.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
© 2020 ACM. Background: Application frameworks, such as Ruby on Rails, introduce abstractions with the goal of simplifying development for particular application domains, such as web development. While experts enjoy increased productivity due to these abstractions, the flow of the programs is often hard to understand for non-experts and newcomers due to implicit flow and concealed lower level action that seems like "magic". Objective: We conjecture that converting these implicit flows into an explicit and unified form can help non-experts comprehend the programs using these frameworks. We call the process of unifying distributed, implicit flows into a single routine deimplicitization. Method: We want to conduct an experiment that studies the impact of deimplicitization on program comprehension. Particularly, we want to study how software developers with different expertise (novices/students, framework experts/professional developers) can answer comprehension questions differently with respect to time and correctness, under the treatments of either a deimplicitized version of the program in Python or the original version of the program in Ruby on Rails.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1145/3379597.3387507
