How do students experience and judge software comprehension techniques?

Paper in proceedings, 2020

Today, there is a wide range of techniques to support softwarecomprehension. However, we do not fully understand yet whattechniques really help novices, to comprehend a software system.In this paper, we present a master level project course on softwareevolution, which has a large focus on software comprehension. Wecollected data about student's experience with diverse comprehension techniques during focus group discussions over the course oftwo years. Our results indicate that systematic code reading canbe supported by additional techniques to guiding reading efforts.Most techniques are considered valuable for gaining an overviewand some techniques are judged to be helpful only in later stagesof software comprehension efforts.