Cognitive processes in program comprehension

Letovsky, Stanley·1987·Journal of Systems and Software

DOI 10.1016/0164-1212(87)90032-x

Open this paper in CoChat — free account

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1016/0164-1212(87)90032-x

Cites

Statistics

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Learning and Teaching Programming: A Review and Discussion
Robins, A., Rountree, J., & Rountree, N. (2003) · Computer Science Education · doi:10.1076/csed.13.2.137.14200 · Cited by 1,736
Best Practices for Scientific Computing
Wilson, G., Aruliah, D. A., Brown, C. T., Chue Hong, N. P., Davis, M., Guy, R. T., Haddock, S. H. D., Huff, K. D., Mitchell, I. M., Plumbley, M. D., et al. (2014) · PLoS Biology · doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001745 · Cited by 723
Questions programmers ask during software evolution tasks
Sillito, J., Murphy, G. C., & De Volder, K. (2006) · Proceedings of the 14th ACM SIGSOFT international symposium on Foundations of software engineering · doi:10.1145/1181775.1181779 · Cited by 270
Hard-to-answer questions about code
LaToza, T. D., & Myers, B. A. (2010) · Evaluation and Usability of Programming Languages and Tools · doi:10.1145/1937117.1937125 · Cited by 141
A Neural Architecture for Generating Natural Language Descriptions from Source Code Changes
Loyola, P., Marrese-Taylor, E., & Matsuo, Y. (2017) · Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers) · doi:10.18653/v1/p17-2045 · Cited by 128
Towards understanding programs through wear-based filtering
DeLine, R., Khella, A., Czerwinski, M., & Robertson, G. (2005) · Proceedings of the 2005 ACM symposium on Software visualization · doi:10.1145/1056018.1056044 · Cited by 91
What help do developers seek, when and how?
Li, H., Xing, Z., Peng, X., & Zhao, W. (2013) · 2013 20th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering (WCRE) · doi:10.1109/wcre.2013.6671289 · Cited by 81
Computer code comprehension shares neural resources with formal logical inference in the fronto-parietal network
Liu, Y.-F., Kim, J., Wilson, C., & Bedny, M. (2020) · eLife · doi:10.7554/elife.59340 · Cited by 64
How statically-typed functional programmers write code
Lubin, J., & Chasins, S. E. (2021) · Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages · doi:10.1145/3485532 · Cited by 18
An empirical study of spreadsheet authors' mental models in explaining and debugging tasks
Kankuzi, B., & Sajaniemi, J. (2013) · 2013 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human Centric Computing · doi:10.1109/vlhcc.2013.6645237 · Cited by 14
The Role of Working Memory in Program Tracing
Crichton, W., Agrawala, M., & Hanrahan, P. (2021) · Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems · doi:10.1145/3411764.3445257 · Cited by 13
Code Review Comprehension: Reviewing Strategies Seen Through Code Comprehension Theories
Gonçalves, P. W., Rani, P., Storey, M.-A., Spinellis, D., & Bacchelli, A. (2025) · 2025 IEEE/ACM 33rd International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC) · doi:10.1109/icpc66645.2025.00068 · Cited by 4

Authors: Letovsky, S.
Venue: Journal of Systems and Software
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Published: 1987-12
Volume: 7
Issue: 4
Pages: 325-339
ISSN: 0164-1212 (ISSN-L)
DOI: 10.1016/0164-1212(87)90032-x
OpenAlex: W2022557060
Cited by: 327
References: 0
FWCI: 12.93
Type: journal article
Language: en
Open access: closed

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review