COMP 7085/8085: Program Comprehension

Tue 28 Aug	Intro to the course
Thu 30 Aug	Seminar Demo: "Eliciting Design Requirements for Maintenance-Oriented IDEs: A Detailed Study of Corrective and Perfective Maintenance Tasks" (Ko et al., 2005) Here are the example slides Discussion Topic: Mental models "Cognitive Design Elements to Support the Construction of a Mental Model During Software Exploration" (Storey et al., 1999)
Tue 4 Sep	Seminar 1: Comprehending APIs "Improving API documentation usability with knowledge pushing" (Dekel & Herbsleb, 2009) "Evaluating Forum Discussions to Inform the Design of an API Critic" (Rupakheti & Hou, 2012)
Thu 6 Sep	Seminar 2: Understanding how developers comprehend "The Influence of the Task on Programmer Behaviour" (Ying & Robillard, 2011) "How do professional developers comprehend software?" (Roehm et al., 2012)
Tue 11 Sep	Seminar 3: Generating documentation "Automatically detecting and describing high level actions within methods" (Sridhara et al., 2011) "Mining source code descriptions from developer communications" (Panichella et al., 2012)
Thu 13 Sep	Presentation Skills Workshop Slides: "Effective Presentation Techniques" (Quinn, 2010) Activity paper: "Improving API Documentation Using API Usage Information" (Stylos et al., 2009)
Tue 18 Sep	Seminar 4: Change-impact analysis "Identifying program, test, and environmental changes that affect behaviour" (Holmes & Notkin,) "Integrated impact analysis for managing software changes" (Gethers et al., 2012)
Thu 20 Sep	Seminar 5: Visualizations for program comprehension "Trace visualization for program comprehension: A controlled experiment" (Cornelissen et al., 2009) "Software systems as cities: A controlled experiment" (Wettel et al., 2011)
Tue 25 Sep	Roundtable
Thu 27 Sep	Seminar 6: User-centered design "Connecting Traces: Understanding Client-Server Interactions in Ajax Applications" (Matthijssen et al., 2010) "Programmer information needs after memory failure" (Parnin & Rugaber, 2012)
Tue 2 Oct	Movie: Developing Natural Language-based Software Analyses & Tools to Expedite Software Maintenance (Hill, 2011) Attendance optional (Dr. Fleming out of town) Due by 2:40p on Oct 9: Answer these questions (turn in as hard copy; handwritten OK)
Thu 4 Oct	Movie: Source Code Evolution with Interactive Transformations (Boshernitsan, 2005) Attendance optional (Dr. Fleming out of town) Due by 2:40p on Oct 9: Answer these questions (turn in as hard copy; handwritten OK)
Tue 9 Oct	Seminar 7: Collaborative program comprehension "Remixing visualization to support collaboration in software maintenance" (Storey et al., 2008) "Collective Code Bookmarks for Program Comprehension" (Guzzi et al., 2011)
Thu 11 Oct	Seminar 8: Designing for comprehension "Developers ask reachability questions" (LaToza & Myers, 2010) "On the congruence of modularity and code coupling" (Beck & Diehl, 2011)
Tue 16 Oct	Fall Break (No Class)
Thu 18 Oct	Seminar 9: Comprehending Relationships among Entities "Codebook: Discovering and Exploiting Relationships in Software Repositories" (Begel et al., 2010) "Code Bubbles: Rethinking the User Interface Paradigm of Integrated Development Environments" (Bragdon et al., 2010)
Tue 23 Oct	Seminar 10: Comprehension for Debugging "Debugging Reinvented: Asking and Answering Why and Why Not Questions about Program Behavior" (Ko & Myers, 2008) "Debugger Canvas: Industrial Experience with the Code Bubbles Paradigm" (DeLine et al., 2012)
Thu 25 Oct	Roundtable Due by 2:40pm: Essay Proposal
Tue 30 Oct	Seminar 11: More Studies of (Microsoft) Developers "Information Needs in Collocated Software Development Teams" (Ko et al., 2007) "The secret life of bugs: Going past the errors and omissions in software repositories" (Aranda & Venolia, 2009)
Thu 1 Nov	Seminar 12: Information Foraging "Silk from a sow's ear: Extracting usable structures from the Web" (Pirolli et al., 1996) "Using Information Scent to Model the Dynamic Foraging Behavior of Programmers in Maintenance Tasks" (Lawrance et al., 2008)
Tue 6 Nov	Seminar 13: Collaborative Information Foraging "Towards a model of understanding social search" (Evans & Chi, 2008) "An elementary social information foraging model" (Pirolli, 2009)
Thu 8 Nov	Seminar 14: Sensemaking "The cost structure of sensemaking" (Russell et al., 1993) "FacetLens: Exposing trends and relationships to support sensemaking within faceted datasets" (Lee et al., 2009)
Tue 13 Nov	Seminar 15: Collaborative Sensemaking "WeSearch: Supporting collaborative search and sensemaking on a tabletop display" (Morris et al., 2010) "Understanding together: Sensemaking in collaborative information seeking" (Paul & Reddy, 2010)
Thu 15 Nov	Movie: Time Management (Pausch, 2007)
Tue 20 Nov	Movie: Seeing Software (Lanza, 2009)
Thu 22 Nov	Thanksgiving Holidays (No Class)
Tue 27 Nov	Group 1: Essay Workshop (attendance mandatory) Turn in draft by Sun 25 Nov Other groups: Essay Preparation Day (attendance optional) Optional: You may quietly observe the Group 1 discussion
Thu 29 Nov	Group 2: Essay Workshop (attendance mandatory) Turn in draft by end of class on Tue 27 Nov Other groups: Essay Preparation Day (attendance optional) Optional: You may quietly observe the Group 2 discussion
Tue 4 Dec	Group 3: Essay Workshop (attendance mandatory) Turn in draft by Sun 2 Dec Other groups: Essay Preparation Day (attendance optional) Optional: You may quietly observe the Group 3 discussion
Thu 6 Dec	Study Day (No Class)
Tue 11 Dec	Final Exam Day (1:00–3:00pm) Video: Your Brain at Work (Rock, 2009) Activity: Win, Lose or Draw, Program Comprehension Edition Due by 1:00pm: Essay Assignment (Here's the document template)