Code Reading: How Students and Professionals Differ

This paper reports on a series of semi-structured interviews and code reading exercises conducted with 10 undergraduate students and 11 professional software engineers in order to better understand how students and professionals differ in how they come to understand a codebase that is novel to them. The goal was to uncover distinctions to help us design teaching activities to help students know how to read source code whose call stack spans multiple methods and files. Students had a more difficult time correctly reading source code than professionals and tended to lack a clear process for tackling code reading exercises. Professionals tended to tackle the code reading exercises more methodically, checked their assumptions, and avoided spending time reading code irrelevant to the exercise presented to them.