research-article

Effects of Modularization on Developers' Cognitive Effort in Code Comprehension Tasks: A Controlled Experiment

Authors:

Matheus Segalotto,

Willian Bolzan,

Kleinner FariasAuthors Info & Claims

SBES '23: Proceedings of the XXXVII Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering

Pages 206 - 215

https://doi.org/10.1145/3613372.3613387

Published: 25 September 2023 Publication History

Abstract

Developers invest the cognitive effort to comprehend instructions in source code. Cognitive effort refers to the cognitive processing of a human being’s brain required to complete a cognitive task. The cognitive effort invested by developers can vary depending on the complexity of how instructions in source code are structured. To implement features, developers can write all instructions in a single method (non-modular) or even modularize it into several methods (modular). However, little is known about the effects of modularizing instructions in source code on the developers’ cognitive effort. Hence, adopting modularization practices ends up being a cognitive effort-insensitive task. This paper, therefore, reports on a controlled experiment that investigates the effects of modularization on the cognitive effort of developers while comprehending instructions in (non-)modular code. We evaluated the modularization of instructions with the participation of 35 developers who performed 10 comprehension tasks using a wearable EEG device. The main results suggest that developers tend to invest less cognitive effort to understand instructions in modular code rather than in non-modular code. However, developers spend more temporal effort to understand instructions in modular code, and this extra time is not converted into a higher rate of correct code comprehension. Our findings shed light on improving the state of the art of modularization practices by making them sensitive to the developers’cognitive effort.

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Cited By

Marco VFarias K(2024)Exploring the Technologies and Architectures Used to Develop Micro-frontend Applications: a Systematic Mapping and Emerging PerspectivesSSRN Electronic Journal10.2139/ssrn.4750661Online publication date: 2024
https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4750661
Singh DMishra AAggarwal A(2024)Investigating the impact of logical reasoning in honing code comprehension skills: An empirical analysisProceedings of the 2024 Sixteenth International Conference on Contemporary Computing10.1145/3675888.3676024(35-41)Online publication date: 8-Aug-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3675888.3676024

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Effects of Modularization on Developers' Cognitive Effort in Code Comprehension Tasks: A Controlled Experiment

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cover image ACM Other conferences

SBES '23: Proceedings of the XXXVII Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering

September 2023

570 pages

ISBN:9798400707872

DOI:10.1145/3613372

Copyright © 2023 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 25 September 2023

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Research-article
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Refereed limited

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Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Rio Grande do Sul (FAPERGS)
Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)

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SBES 2023

SBES 2023: XXXVII Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering

September 25 - 29, 2023

Campo Grande, Brazil

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Overall Acceptance Rate 147 of 427 submissions, 34%

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Cited By

Marco VFarias K(2024)Exploring the Technologies and Architectures Used to Develop Micro-frontend Applications: a Systematic Mapping and Emerging PerspectivesSSRN Electronic Journal10.2139/ssrn.4750661Online publication date: 2024
https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4750661
Singh DMishra AAggarwal A(2024)Investigating the impact of logical reasoning in honing code comprehension skills: An empirical analysisProceedings of the 2024 Sixteenth International Conference on Contemporary Computing10.1145/3675888.3676024(35-41)Online publication date: 8-Aug-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3675888.3676024

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