An in-vivo study of the cognitive levels employed by programmers during software maintenance

Abstract

Several researchers have proposed Bloom's Taxonomy as a framework within which to study the cognitive levels employed by programmers during software comprehension. But a review of empirical studies in this area illustrates that previous work has nearly exclusively focused on the lower cognitive levels of the taxonomy. However, the taxonomy was initially proposed as a ‘cumulative hierarchy’, where less processing occurred at higher levels. This suggests that the focus of current software comprehension literature is appropriate. Given that there is mixed empirical evidence for this ‘cumulative hierarchy’ property, this work reports on the cognitive levels employed by 6 programmers, involved in in-vivo software maintenance and comprehension. It suggests that the cumulative hierarchy property is true of these contexts, thus adding legitimacy to the focus of the existing literature. However, it notes that processing at the higher cognitive levels does occur and is associated with specific maintenance sub-tasks. As this processing is effort and skill intensive, there is still a need for researchers to explore these higher cognitive levels.