Information relationships in PROLOG programs: how do programmers comprehend functionality?

Abstract

Within the context of software development, psychological complexity is a measure of the difficulty a programmer experiences when interacting with a program. To date there has been little research to investigate models of program comprehension as a basis for developing psychological complexity metrics. The purpose of this study is to identify information relationships that reflect the organization of programmers' cognitive models during the comprehension of unfamiliar PROLOG programs. An analysis of frequency and temporal ordering of subject protocols provides support for a two-model theory of PROLOG comprehension. During comprehension, programmers construct both a program model based on the detection of data structure relationships and a domain or real-world model based on the detection of function relationships.