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References Navigation arrow Authors Navigation arrow Christopher F. Bertholf
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Christopher F. Bertholf

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Publications by Christopher F. Bertholf (bibliography)

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Bertholf, Christopher F. and Scholtz, Jeanne (1993): Program Comprehension of Literate Programs by Novice Programmers. In: Cook, Curtis, Scholtz, Jean and Spohrer, James C. (eds.) Empirical Studies of Programmers - Fifth Workshop December 3-15, 1993, 1993, Palo Alto, California. p. 222.

“This study compares comprehension of Lit style literate programs with that of traditional modular programs with both internal and external documentation. Literate programming (Knuth, 1984)* enhances a computer program by incorporating program text into a comprehensive design document. Although not previously well defined, we believe Knuth's concept has great intuitive appeal, fits in well with a multi-disciplinary approach to automating portions of the software engineering process, and can be adapted easily to the incorporation of empirically derived principles of program comprehension. The Lit system developed by Chris Bertholf employs many of Knuth's principles for literate style programs as well as several others; the program text is incorporated into a comprehensive design document which uses typographic cues and a book style presentation paradigm. A program description and information about design history, the task domain, and implementation are included in the program document. The table of contents provides information about the overall structure of the program. In addition, algorithms are documented in pseudo-code and documentation of anticipated modifications is included. Extensive documentation of the usage of variables, procedures, and functions is also included. Does this increased amount of documentation and the unique presentation format hinder or facilitate program comprehension? This study compared the comprehension results of 20 novice programmers randomly divided into two groups and given either a traditional modular FORTRAN program or an equivalent Lit style literate program to modify. Subjects performed the task of completing an incomplete program; all program modifications were made on paper, thus syntax errors were expected. The elapsed time to produce a solution was recorded, and several measures of comprehension were collected and analyzed. Completed programs were judged as completely correct, functionally correct with syntax errors, or incorrect. The overall result was that subjects given the literate programs found a solution more often than did subjects using the traditional modular programs. None of the subjects given the modular programs were able to produce even functionally correct solutions. In addition, none of the subjects given Lit style literate programs modified sections of code that were unrelated to the modification specification while all of the subjects given traditional modular programs modified sections of code which were unrelated to the modification specification. Similar results have also been obtained with advanced programmers in another related study. Although this study did not attempt to isolate the factors which aided in comprehension, it did show that the Lit style programs are useful for program maintenance tasks. Future research in this area should concentrate on isolating the factors that produced such a marked distinction in performance between the Lit style literate program group and the traditional program group. * Knuth, D. (1984). Literate Programming. The Computer Journal, 27(2), 97-112.”

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Changes to this page (author)

14 Feb 2010: Enabled abstracts to be shown on Christopher F. Bertholf's author page.
28 Apr 2003: Added the author to the bibliography

Publication statistics

Publication period:1993-1993
Publication count:1
Number of co-authors:1



Productive colleagues

Christopher F. Bertholf's 3 most productive colleagues in number of publications:

Jeanne Scholtz:4


Collaboration count

Number of publications with 3 favourite co-authors:

Jeanne Scholtz:1

 

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Mar 21

“ Software design is the act of determining the user's experience with a piece of software. It has nothing to do with how the code works inside, or how big or small the code is. The designer's task is to specify completely and unambiguously the user's whole experience. ”

-- David Liddle, From Bringing Design to Software, edited by Terry Winograd, 1996 ”

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