Women & Men – Different but Equal: On the Impact of Identifier Style on Source Code Reading. Sharafi, Z., Soh, Z., Gu�h�neuc, Y., & Antoniol, G. In van Deursen, A. & Godfrey, M. W., editors, Proceedings of the 20<sup>th</sup> International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC), pages 27–36, June, 2012. IEEE CS Press. 10 pages.
Paper abstract bibtex Program comprehension is preliminary to any program evolution task. Researchers agree that identifiers play an important role in code reading and program understanding activities. Yet, to the best of our knowledge, only one work investigated the impact of gender on the memorability of identifiers and thus, ultimately, on program comprehension. This paper reports the results of an experiment involving 15 male subjects and nine female subjects to study the impact of gender on the subjects' visual effort, required time, as well as accuracy to recall Camel Case versus Underscore identifiers in source code reading. We observe no statistically-significant difference in term of accuracy, required time, and effort. However, our data supports the conjecture that male and female subjects follow different comprehension strategies: female subjects seem to carefully weight all options and spend more time to rule out wrong answers while male subjects seem to quickly set their minds on some answers, possibly the wrong ones. Indeed, we found that the effort spent on wrong answers is significantly higher for female subjects and that there is an interaction between the effort that female subjects invested on wrong answers and their higher percentages of correct answers when compared to male subjects.
@INPROCEEDINGS{Sharafi12-ICPC-MenWomen,
AUTHOR = {Zohreh Sharafi and Z�phyrin Soh and Yann-Ga�l Gu�h�neuc and
Giuliano Antoniol},
BOOKTITLE = {Proceedings of the 20<sup>th</sup> International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC)},
TITLE = {Women & Men -- Different but Equal: On the Impact of
Identifier Style on Source Code Reading},
YEAR = {2012},
OPTADDRESS = {},
OPTCROSSREF = {},
EDITOR = {van Deursen, Arie and Michael W. Godfrey},
MONTH = {June},
NOTE = {10 pages.},
OPTNUMBER = {},
OPTORGANIZATION = {},
PAGES = {27--36},
PUBLISHER = {IEEE CS Press},
OPTSERIES = {},
OPTVOLUME = {},
KEYWORDS = {Topic: <b>Program comprehension</b>, Venue: <c>ICPC</c>},
URL = {http://www.ptidej.net/publications/documents/ICPC12b.doc.pdf},
PDF = {http://www.ptidej.net/publications/documents/ICPC12b.ppt.pdf},
ABSTRACT = {Program comprehension is preliminary to any program
evolution task. Researchers agree that identifiers play an important
role in code reading and program understanding activities. Yet, to
the best of our knowledge, only one work investigated the impact of
gender on the memorability of identifiers and thus, ultimately, on
program comprehension. This paper reports the results of an
experiment involving 15 male subjects and nine female subjects to
study the impact of gender on the subjects' visual effort, required
time, as well as accuracy to recall Camel Case versus Underscore
identifiers in source code reading. We observe no
statistically-significant difference in term of accuracy, required
time, and effort. However, our data supports the conjecture that male
and female subjects follow different comprehension strategies: female
subjects seem to carefully weight all options and spend more time to
rule out wrong answers while male subjects seem to quickly set their
minds on some answers, possibly the wrong ones. Indeed, we found that
the effort spent on wrong answers is significantly higher for female
subjects and that there is an interaction between the effort that
female subjects invested on wrong answers and their higher
percentages of correct answers when compared to male subjects.}
}
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