Paper Info
Title
Do professional developers benefit from design pattern documentation? a replication in the context of source code comprehension
Abstract
We present the results of a differentiated replication conducted with professional developers to assess whether the presence and the kind of documentation for the solutions or instances of design patterns affect source code comprehension. The participants were divided into three groups and asked to comprehend a chunk of the JHot- Draw source code. Depending on the group, each participant was or not provided with the graphical and textual representations of the design pattern instances implemented within that source code. In the case of graphically documented instances, we used UML class diagrams, while textually documented instances are reported as comment in the source code. The results revealed that participants provided with the documentation of the instances achieved a significantly better comprehension than the participants with source code alone. The effect of the kind of documentation is not statistically significant.
Year
DOI
Venue
2012
10.1007/978-3-642-33666-9_13
MoDELS
Keywords
Field
DocType
design pattern,design pattern instance,better comprehension,professional developer,differentiated replication,source code comprehension,textual representation,source code,uml class diagram,design pattern documentation,design patterns
Programming language,Unified Modeling Language,Computer science,Source code,Internal documentation,Software design pattern,Theoretical computer science,Documentation,Comprehension,Class diagram,Design pattern
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
10
0.46
19
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Carmine Gravino172147.71
Michele Risi240340.98
Giuseppe Scanniello388377.10
Genoveffa Tortora41477151.59