| Up to 50% of software maintenance costs are spent on program comprehension or source code navigation [83]. Thus, it is important to understand how software engineers navigate and understand the source code in order to reduce the costs and improve the quality of software maintenance. However, when examined closely, program comprehension exhibits significant behavioural similarities with spatial cognition, particularly when considering the influence of risk-taking behaviour. Furthermore, sex-based performance difference is another important factor affecting programmer behaviours of program comprehension. As females are more risk-averse than males [25], a higher level of abstraction is more risky than a lower level of abstraction, and landmark strategies for spatial cognition are more abstract than orientation strategies, females prefer landmark strategies while males prefer orientation strategies [71]. Similarly, in program comprehension, the bottom-up comprehension strategy is considered to be less risky and less abstract than a top-down comprehension strategy. In this thesis, a sex-based program comprehension model is built and that establishes the relationships between spatial cognition skills and program comprehension behaviour, and takes the sex difference in risk-taking behaviour into account. A series of experimental tests compared programmer's performance on spatial cognition and program comprehension tasks and the resultant data showed appropriate sex-based correlations between them. Thus, there is strong evidence that similar cognitive skills are used for spatial cognition and program comprehension, and that females tend to use the bottom-up comprehension model while males prefer the top-down comprehension model. |
