An Empirical Study on the Impact of Deimplicitization on Comprehension in Programs Using Application Frameworks
© 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...
| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Other Authors: | |
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
ACM
2021
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| Online Access: | https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/137591 |
| _version_ | 1826206847875416064 |
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| author | Cito, Jürgen Shen, Jiasi Rinard, Martin |
| author2 | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory |
| author_facet | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Cito, Jürgen Shen, Jiasi Rinard, Martin |
| author_sort | Cito, Jürgen |
| collection | MIT |
| description | © 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. |
| first_indexed | 2024-09-23T13:39:13Z |
| format | Article |
| id | mit-1721.1/137591 |
| institution | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| language | English |
| last_indexed | 2024-09-23T13:39:13Z |
| publishDate | 2021 |
| publisher | ACM |
| record_format | dspace |
| spelling | mit-1721.1/1375912021-11-06T03:19:22Z An Empirical Study on the Impact of Deimplicitization on Comprehension in Programs Using Application Frameworks Cito, Jürgen Shen, Jiasi Rinard, Martin Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory © 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. 2021-11-05T19:16:01Z 2021-11-05T19:16:01Z 2020-06 2021-03-10T14:38:49Z Article http://purl.org/eprint/type/ConferencePaper https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/137591 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. en 10.1145/3379597.3387507 Proceedings - 2020 IEEE/ACM 17th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories, MSR 2020 Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ application/pdf ACM MIT web domain |
| spellingShingle | Cito, Jürgen Shen, Jiasi Rinard, Martin An Empirical Study on the Impact of Deimplicitization on Comprehension in Programs Using Application Frameworks |
| title | An Empirical Study on the Impact of Deimplicitization on Comprehension in Programs Using Application Frameworks |
| title_full | An Empirical Study on the Impact of Deimplicitization on Comprehension in Programs Using Application Frameworks |
| title_fullStr | An Empirical Study on the Impact of Deimplicitization on Comprehension in Programs Using Application Frameworks |
| title_full_unstemmed | An Empirical Study on the Impact of Deimplicitization on Comprehension in Programs Using Application Frameworks |
| title_short | An Empirical Study on the Impact of Deimplicitization on Comprehension in Programs Using Application Frameworks |
| title_sort | empirical study on the impact of deimplicitization on comprehension in programs using application frameworks |
| url | https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/137591 |
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