Cognition process of developers

• Main Author: Toh, You Xin
• Other Authors: School of Computer Engineering
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2014
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Computer science and engineering::Software::Software engineering
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/58934
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

There have been many written articles by various academic and researchers on the cognition process of humans. However, literature and research from a software developer’s perspective are limited. In this research project, it aims to investigate how software developers understand program information and identify the kind of cognitive process and information structure they used in their daily work through empirical studies and data analysis. The purpose of this project is to investigate the behavioural patterns of software developers through the conduct of a program experiment where participants were invited to debug and attempt to run a program free of errors within a time frame of thirty minutes. The experiment also aims to offer an insight into how software developers think when debugging the program by analyzing the kind of activity or technique used to solve the programming errors based on the data collected from the experimental results. The entire experiment consist of three main components; a pre-survey questionnaire to get a brief profile of the software development background of participants, a experiment with a debugger program where participants have to record their attempt using a screen capture software and finally, a post survey questionnaire to get a clear insight and brief understanding in relation to the cognition process of each participant towards software development and programming based on their responses. The data analysis performed on the data collected and experimental results suggested that all the participants involved in this project had different strategies, approaches and thinking processes towards understanding software program information. Each of the participant’s cognitive process is unique and they were not exactly similar, even though there was a general consensus on some of the problem solving techniques used. However, due to a small sample size used for this project, it is recommended that a bigger sample size be used to get a better result on the behaviour patterns of software developers based on their cognitive process towards understanding program information.