What Programmers Really Do - An Observational Study

Although the field of program comprehension as a research discipline has evolved considerably over the past years, only little is known about how software engineers perform their work. In this paper, we report on an observational study that we have carried out to investigate how software developers understand code when they approach a given maintenance task. We particularly focused on the developers’ activities, tools, information needs and their practices. In the study, we observed seven professional programmers at a large supplier in the automotive domain while performing a real maintenance task within their normal workflow. Afterwards we conducted a semi-structured interview to get a deeper insight into the process of program understanding. The focus of our analysis has been on what kind of activities a programmer performs and how those activities depend on each other. We categorize different kinds of activities based on this analysis, highlight challenges faced by the programmers, and discuss the implications of our results on the maintenance process.