This thesis introduces a grounded theory of the discourse structure that professional software engineers use while explaining software. The ‘Snapshot Theory’ relates how the snapshot is the critical moment and fundamental building block in the discourse structure. We built Snapshot Theory by applying a rigorous qualitative data analysis research methodology, known as grounded theory, on observa...

Examples are a powerful tool for teaching both humans and computers. In order to learn from examples, however, a student must first extract the examples from its stream of perception. Snapshot learning is a general approach to this problem, in which relevant samples of perception are used as examples. Learning from these examples can in turn improve the judgement of the snapshot mechanism, impr...