Program Comprehension

In what venues is program comprehension research published?

Several common types of peer-reviewed venues:

• Conferences (workshops, symposiums, etc.)
  • Publish original research (plus other stuff)
  • In CS, conferences are most prestigious venues
  • Works published in proceedings
• Journals
  • Publish original research
  • Also can be prestigious, but generally a bit less so than conferences
  • Common pattern: publish conference paper and publish expanded version in journal (30% new material)
  • More iterative (and longer) review/refinement process than conferences
• Magazines
  • Usually just invite researchers to provide summaries of their research to date (already published results)
  • Tend to be highly visible (and prestigious?)

Specific Venues of Interest

Conferences

• ICPC: IEEE Int’l Conference on Program Comprehension
  • Good quality second-tier conference
• ICSE: ACM/IEEE Int’l Conference on Software Engineering
  • The top software engineering conference
• FSE: ACM SIGSOFT Int’l Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering
  • The “other” top software engineering conference
• ICSME: IEEE Int’l Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution
  • High-quality second-tier conference
• CHI: ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
  • Top HCI conference
• VL/HCC: IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing
  • High-quality second-tier conference
  • HCC part is where the program comprehension stuff is generally found

Journals

• TSE: IEEE Transactions on Sofware Engineering
  • Top software engineering journal
• TOSEM: ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology
  • The “other” top software engineering journal
• TOCHI: ACM Transaction on Computer–Human Interaction
  • The top HCI journal (I think)

Magazines

• Computer
  • IEEE magazine for broad computing audience
• IEEE Software
  • Software engineering magazine

What topics in program comprehension are hot right now?

Activity:

1. Go to http://dl.acm.org/
2. Go to your assigned proceedings
   • One of ICSE ‘17, FSE ‘16, FSE ‘17, CHI ‘17
3. Look at each research paper (at least title and abstract)
4. Record for paper
   • Relevance to program comprehension
     (2 high, 1 low, 0 none, ??? unsure)
   • Rationale for relevance score if not obvious
   • Broad type of research that is focus of paper
     (“People” understanding people, “Tool” helping people, “Both”)
   • Your level of interest in reading this work in detail and presenting it
     (3 high, 2 medium, 1 low, 0 none)

Spreadsheet columns:

• Venue (ICSE, FSE, or CHI)
• Title
• Relevance (2, 1, 0, or ???)
• Rationale
• Type (People/Empirical, Tool/Approach, or Both)
• Interest (3, 2, 1, or 0)