The Challenge For Developers - Understanding Code
In study after study the results have been consistent: programmers spend a large amount of their time making sense of code. This is true whether the code was written by other team members or by the programmer himself just 4 months ago.
Click here for detailed studies.
Where Tools Have Failed
The challenge when using most tools has been that they are hard to use, almost as hard as comprehending the code. Tools have traditionally focused either on the needs of designers and modellers by providing significant support for generating code from UML diagrams or on the needs of software architects by providing powerful technology that requires significant training.
Architexa provides a suite that supports an intuitive but powerful interface to UML diagramming by giving users an interactive exploratory visualization platform.
Studies About Code Understanding
Following are some of the main results found by researchers studying developers' coding needs:
| Researcher | Result |
| IBM Corbi, 1989 |
More than half of the effort in accomplishing a task for a programmer goes toward understanding the system |
| Bell Labs Davison, 1992 |
New project members spend 60%-80% of their time understanding code. This number drops to 20% as the developers gain experience |
| National Research Council in Canada Singer et al, 2006 |
Developers spending over 25% of their time either searching for or looking at code |
| Microsoft D. LaToza, 2007 |
Equal amount of time is spent understanding code as is spent on other tasks such as designing, unit testing, and writing |
| Microsoft Peter Hallam, 2006 |
More than 70% of a developer's time is spent understanding code, as it is a preliminary requisite |
| Microsoft Cherubini, 2007 |
95% of developers agreed that understanding existing code is a significant part of their job. Over 65% indicated that they spend time understanding existing code at least once a day (with over 25% indicating that they do it multiple times a day) |
