Challenges in Program Comprehension

Program comprehension as a subtask of software maintenance and evolution consumes about half of the time spent by the developers who have to explore a systems’ source code to find and understand the subset of the code which is relevant to their current task. The problems encountered during the comprehension process influence the time spent on program comprehension to a great extent. Although many empirical studies have been conducted in the field of program comprehension, only little is known about the challenges developers face when trying to understand a software system. This paper reports on an observational study of 28 professional developers, investigating their behaviour with respect to the occurring problems.