Developers work with many different artifacts and environments throughout their careers, whether it be in established rules on how to write code, how they have their code presented in their IDE, or how developers communicate with one another. Determining how different aspects of a developer's environment and coding practices affect their level of program comprehension can give us insight into the cognitive processes and the construction of mental models by a developer, which can ultimately determine how a developer's level of productivity may be measured. In this paper, I provide an overview of several empirical studies where I assess comprehension and emotional state using biometric devices while developers perform typical software engineering tasks. The results of these studies can help develop guidelines to help towards productivity. Advisor: Bonita Sharif (University of Nebraska - Lincoln)

A controlled experiment investigating the effect layout has on how students find defects in UML class diagrams with respect to requirements is presented. Two layout schemes from prior literature namely, multi-cluster and orthogonal layouts, are compared with respect to two open source systems, Doxygen and Qt. The experiment is conducted with 89 students from two universities in a classroom lab setting. Each participant is placed in one of two groups where each group are given 2 defect detection tasks (with five sub-parts) with each task using one of the two layouts in each subject system. The only difference between groups is that the layouts were flipped between the two tasks. Feedback is collected after each task. A mental rotation and object memory task is conducted at the end of the two tasks to correlate their spatial and working memory skills to the task performance. Results indicate that the multi-cluster layout performed better in terms of accuracy of finding defects, but not significantly. There is also not much difference in time to find them. Furthermore, it is found that the object memory skills are sometimes correlated with the performance of the defect detection tasks. These results can be used to help improve the teaching of UML class diagram defect detection skills by incorporating clustered layouts and object memory tasks. In addition, they can help identify people who are best suited for finding critical defects in design.

Background and Context: The designers of programming editors aimed at learners have long experimented with different styles of code presentation. The idea of syntax highlighting – coloring specific words – is very old. More recently, some editors (including text-, frame- and block-based editors) have added forms of scope highlighting – colored rectangles to represent programming scope – but there have been few studies to investigate whether this is beneficial for novices when reading and understanding program code.