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A study in dimensions of psychological complexity of programs

✍ Scribed by B.D. Chaudhary; H.V. Sahasrabuddhe


Publisher
Elsevier Science
Year
1985
Weight
952 KB
Volume
23
Category
Article
ISSN
0020-7373

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✦ Synopsis


Program comprehension is considered to be a two-stage process. The two stages broadly consist of formation and use of a mental representation of the program. Based on this two-stage process, five features of the program are identified as factors contributing to the psychological complexity of the program. The identified factors are: meaningfulness, size, control structure, data structure and execution structure. This article reports consolidated results of a series of experiments conducted to establish and to study the integrated effect of these factors on program comprehension. The two experiments in the series are discussed in detail. The results of the judgemental experiment indicate that program size, control structure, data structure and execution structure contribute independently to perceived program complexity and their contributions to complexity are different. The results of experiments, including the two described in the paper, on program comprehension confirm that the above four algorithm-dependent factors affect program understanding and hence contribute to the psychological complexity of the program.


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