This paper describes an experiment to evaluate measures of program comprehension. The wide variety of approaches to measuring comprehension means that it is difficult to compare measures and have confidence in the reliability and accuracy of measures. Following a review of comprehension measures employed in a number of empirical studies, four essential measures - maintenance, mental simulation, static and subjective (self-ranking) - are identified. These measures are then evaluated using a group of 157 novice programmers. The results indicate that the measures based on mental simulation are the most reliable, followed by maintenance based tasks. Static tasks appear to be notoriously unreliable, and subjective measures are cheap and worth using (along with another measure). Advice is also given on the creation of questions to measure comprehension. 1. Introduction Program comprehension measures are frequently used in empirical studies as a means of establishing the level of understand...

This paper presents a controlled experiment conducted with senior software engineering students that demonstrates the utility of forming teams based on R. Meredith Belbin’s set of team roles. The overall research effort focuses on the general utility of Belbin’s roles in improving the effectiveness of teams, which can be view in two ways: performance and team viability. Performance effectiveness, which is the focus of this paper, clearly addresses a team’s productivity. To address this problem, the first phase of the total research project consists of a controlled experiment that demonstrates that teams containing leadership roles perform better than teams that do not have this role filled. In a laboratory setting, a number of teams were formed that contained a single leader; others were formed that had no leader or multiple leaders. The results of this experiment are positive; they demonstrate that indeed Belbin’s roles provide useful information to form teams. The specific conclusion of this controlled experiment is that a single leader on a team improves a team’s performance over teams having multiple leaders or no leader. In other words, as one would expect, the mean time-to-completion for the leaderless teams was significantly greater than the teams with leaders. This means that Belbin’s roles can be utilized in formation of new teams as well as in evaluation of extant teams, making certain that a team has a single leader. Both of these aspects, formation and evaluation, are extremely useful to managers of software programmers. 1.

Most software reuse research has ignored the role of the software engineer. However, software engineers tend to be better reasoners and have more experiences to recall than tool-based reuse mechanisms. This paper argues for integrating software engineers into existing reuse paradigms and providing tool support to assist problem description and component understanding, selection and adaptation. However, empirical studies indicate that these reuse tasks are difficult, even for experienced software engineers. Therefore, guidelines and a high-level architecture for design of tool support are based on reports of behaviour and problems arising during reuse. 1: Introduction Many technical solutions to software reuse problems have failed to result in widespread reuse. One reason may be that these solutions ignore human involvement. This paper investigates specific problems which arise from excluding software developers from the reuse process and proposes solutions based on human involvement fo...

The objective of this research is to show the utility of roles and personality characteristics to the evaluation and formation of software development teams. The goals of this research include demonstrating empirically that Belbin’s team roles can be used to form and evaluate software teams, providing a partial validation of the analyses by using the Belbin roles to analyze teams from the software industry, and comparing the personality data collected for this research to data from two previous studies and to the general population. In the highly competitive software industry, improving the software development process can be critical to a company’s success. More specifically, improving a team’s productivity can save employers significant time and money. This investigation addresses the productivity of software development teams in a series of studies. First, controlled studies empirically show that Belbin’s roles can be used in team formation to improve team performance. Second, additional studies, both qualitative and quantitative, demonstrate that Belbin’s roles can be used as criteria in team evaluation and formation. Finally, teams from the software development industry are evaluated, providing a partial