A Neuroscientific Foundation of Program Comprehension

ongoing

"The pivotal role of software in our modern world mandates strong requirements on quality, correctness, and reliability of software systems. In software development and maintenance, the ability to understand program artifacts plays a key role for programmers to fulfill these requirements. Despite significant progress, research on program comprehension has a fundamental limitation: program comprehension is a cognitive process that cannot be directly observed, which leaves considerable room for misinterpretation, uncertainty, and confounders. In Brains On Code, we will develop a neuroscientific foundation of program comprehension. Instead of merely observing whether there is a difference regarding program comprehension (e.g., between two programming methods), we aim at precisely and reliably determining the key factors that cause the difference. This is especially challenging as humans are the subjects of study, and inter-personal variance and other confounding factors obfuscate the results. The key idea of Brains On Code is to leverage established methods from cognitive neuroscience to obtain insights into the underlying processes and influential factors of program comprehension. Brains On Code will pursue a multimodal approach that integrates different neuro-physiological measures as well as a cognitive computational modeling approach to establish the theoretical foundation. This way, Brains On Code will lay the foundations of measuring and modeling program comprehension and offer substantial feedback for programming methodology, language design, and education. Addressing longstanding foundational questions such as ""How can we reliably measure program comprehension?"", ""What makes a program hard to understand?"", and ""What skills should programmers have?"" will become into reach. A success of Brains On Code would not only help answer these questions, but also provide an outline for applying the methodology beyond program code (models, specifications, etc.)."