IDENTIFICATION OF DYNAMIC COMPREHENSION PROCESSES DURING LARGE-SCALE MAINTENANCE

We present results of observing professional maintenance engineers wor king with industrial code at actual maintenance tasks. Protocol analys is is used to explore how code understanding might differ for small ve rsus large scale code. The experiment confirms that cognition processe s work at all levels of abstraction simultaneously as programmers buil d a mental model of the code. Analysis focused on dynamic properties a nd processes of code understanding. Cognition processes emerged at thr ee levels of aggregation representing lower and higher level strategie s of understanding. They show differences in what triggers them and ho w they achieve their goals. Results are useful for defining informatio n which maintenance engineers need for their work and for documentatio n and development standards.