LO, David

SEREBRENIK, Alexander

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Lo, David

Serebrenik, Alexander

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Preface to the Special Issue on Program Comprehension

Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University

Singapore Management University Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University Research Collection School Of Information Systems School of Information Systems 1-2019 Preface to the special issue on program comprehension David LO Singapore Management University, davidlo@smu.edu.sg Alexander SEREBRENIK Follow this and additional works at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research  Part of the Software Engineering Commons Citation LO, David and SEREBRENIK, Alexander. Preface to the special issue on program comprehension. (2019). Empirical Software Engineering. 24, (1), 208-210. Research Collection School Of Information Systems. Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/4889 This Transcript is brought to you for free and open access by the School of Information Systems at Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University. It has been accepted for inclusion in Research Collection School Of Information Systems by an authorized administrator of Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University. For more information, please email libIR@smu.edu.sg. Preface to the Special Issue on Program ComprehensionDavid Lo1 & Alexander Serebrenik2Published online: 17 October 2018# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2018We are delighted to present a selection of the best papers presented at the 25th IEEE Interna-tional Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC 2017) that took place in Buenos Aires,Argentina. The program committee has received 83 submissions originating from 97 abstractsand co-authored by researchers from 26 countries from Africa, Asia, Europe, North and SouthAmerica and Oceania. This is more than double of the 39 submissions received back in 2000.1To select the papers for the special issue the PC chairs have selected the top five papers withthe highest ratings from the reviewers. Each of these papers receives an average rating of ≥1.7on the scale of −3 to 3, with at least two reviewers giving 2 (BAccept^) or 3 (BStrong Accept^).Authors of the invited papers have significantly revised their work preparing the journalsubmission. Each of these submissions has been subject to additional reviewing. To obtaincomplementary perspectives, we have invited original reviewers—who reviewed the confer-ence version of the work—and new ones. At the end of the reviewing process, we have a totalof three extended papers that form this special issue.One of the papers is by Almeida et al. who have won the best paper award. In their extendedversion, entitled BInvestigatingWhether and How Software Developers Understand Open SourceSoftware Licensing^, the authors have conducted a survey of 375 developers that poseddevelopment scenarios involving three popular open source licenses (GNUGPL 3.0, GNULGPL3.0 and MPL 2.0) both alone and in combination. By comparing the answers of the developerswith those of a legal expert, the authors observed that although developers clearly understoodcases involving one license, presence of multiple licenses clearly hindered their understanding.Furthermore, the authors have analyzed license-related questions on a popular question-and-answer platform and interviewed several developers. The results call for tool support to help guidedevelopers in understanding the structure of the code and the technical details of a project whiletaking into account the exact requirements imposed by the licenses involved.Empirical Software Engineering (2019) 24:208–210https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-018-9662-11While the history of the Workshop on Program Comprehension (WPC), a predecessor of ICPC, goes back to1997 we could not find information on the submission numbers prior to 2000.* David Lodavidlo@smu.edu.sg* Alexander Serebrenika.serebrenik@tue.nl1 Singapore Management University, 80 Stamford Road, Singapore 178902, Singapore2 Eindhoven University of Technology, P.O. Box 513, 5600MB, Eindhoven, The NetherlandsAnother paper in this special issue is authored by Ceccato et al. entitled BUnderstanding theBehaviour of Hackers while Performing Attack Tasks in a Professional Setting and in a PublicChallenge^. It focuses on comprehension in a very specific and less studied context of securityattacks. Indeed, as noted by the authors comprehension strategies of hackers trying to attackthe protected software might differ from program understanding for benign purposes. Theauthors have conducted three industrial case studies with the involvement of professionalpenetration testers and a public challenge consisting of eight attack tasks with open participa-tion. Based on the case studies, the authors developed a taxonomy consisting of 169 concepts,covering activities related to different stages of comprehension.The final paper included in this special issue, BSyntax, Predicates, Idioms—What ReallyAffects Code Complexity?^ by Ajami et al. study factors that affect program comprehension.In particular, the authors report on an experiment in an online game-like environment tomeasure how quickly and accurately 220 professional programmers can interpret code snippetswith similar functionality but different structures. The authors have observed differences incomprehension of code snippets in terms of comprehension time and correctness. For instance,for-loops are significantly harder to comprehend than ifs, loops counting down slightly requiremore time to comprehend than those counting up, and loops with unusual bounds result inmore errors. The authors highlight implications of their findings on understanding limitationsof existing complexity metrics and designing better ones.We hope that you will enjoy reading these article extensions of some of the best paperspresented at ICPC 2017 and cordially invite you to participate in and get involved with thewelcoming ICPC community!David Lo received his PhD degree from the School of Computing, National University of Singapore in 2008. Heis currently an Associate Professor in the School of Information Systems, Singapore Management University. Hehas more than 10 years of experience in software engineering and data mining research and has more than 200publications in these areas. He received the Lee Foundation and Lee Kong Chian Fellow for Research Excellencefrom the Singapore Management University in 2009 and 2018, and a number of international research andservice awards including multiple ACM distinguished paper awards for his work on software analytics. He hasserved as general and program co-chair of several prestigious international conferences (e.g., IEEE/ACMInternational Conference on Automated Software Engineering), and editorial board member of a number ofhigh-quality journals (e.g., Empirical Software Engineering).Empirical Software Engineering (2019) 24:208–210 209Alexander Serebrenik (PhD, K.U. Leuven, Belgium 2003; MSc, Hebrew University, Israel, 1999), seniormember of IEEE, is an Associate Professor of software evolution at Eindhoven University of Technology. Hisresearch covers a wide range of topics, from source code analysis, to collaborative and human aspects of softwareengineering. He has co-authored a book BEvolving Software Systems^ (Springer Verlag, 2014), and more than100 scientific papers and articles. He has won Distinguished Paper awards at the International Conference onSoftware Engineering (2017) and the International Conference on the Quality of Information and Communica-tions Technology (2014), as well as special contribution awards at ESEM 2018 and MSR 2017. He is the steeringcommittee chair of the International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution. He is member of theeditorial boards of Empirical Software Engineering (Spinger Verlag), Journal of Systems and Software (Elsevier),and Science of Computer Programming; he has also serves or served on the program committees of suchsoftware engineering conferences as ICSE, ESEC/FSE, ICSM(E), MSR, SANER and ICPC, winning severalDistinguished Reviewer awards.210 Empirical Software Engineering (2019) 24:208–210

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