Understanding Software Comprehension – A ‘Quality’ Issue

The ISO definition of quality uses the phrase the “totality of characteristics”. These characteristics are also known as quality attributes or quality factors, and these terms are used interchangeably. Software quality factors are commonly referred to as the ‘…ilities’, since quality factors include items like maintainability, reliability, portability, usability, comprehensibility, etc. (Deutcsh, Michael, Willis, 1988).

This paper primarily focuses on software comprehensibility, as a growing issue in software quality research. In doing so, it formally distinguishes between two variants of top-down comprehension (as originally described by Brooks and Soloway). The first is ‘inference-based’ comprehension, where the programmer derives meaning from clichéd implementations in the code. The second is ‘expectation-based’ comprehension, where the programmer has pre-generated expectations of the code's meaning. The paper describes the distinguishing features of each variant, and suggests some factors, which passively suggest the choice of comprehension strategy employed by programmers during program comprehension.