Auditors and programmers review information systems and application documentation for a number of purposes, including the evaluation and maintenance of controls. Information systems documentation may include application flowcharts, systems flowcharts, logic diagrams, etc. The same coded application procedure can be represented in the application documentation in different ways. Prior research suggests that the form of the documentation may affect the ability of auditors and programmers to efficiently and effectively review the documentation. This study reports an experiment that investigates the effect of alternate forms of documentation on the efficiency and effectiveness of the auditor and programmer's review of documentation. The review task of interest involves the auditor or programmer's identification and evaluation of control procedures within an application. The hypotheses are based upon the theory of cognitive fit which postulates that decision-making performance on a task will be enhanced when there is a cognitive fit (i.e., match) between the information emphasized in the representation and that required by the task. The results indicate that subjects using a spatial representation (flowcharts) took less time to complete the review task than the subjects using a symbolic (structured English) representation. There were, however, no differences in accuracy across the two representations. These results held for both spatial and symbolic review tasks
