Using Program Comprehension Models to Teach Comprehensibility.

There is general agreement that code should be written to be as comprehensible as possible, and therefore should be an important topic when teaching software development. The challenge faced by educators is that the advice as to what makes code comprehensible is often too general to be useful in a teaching setting, or seems to be inconsistent. In this practitioner paper, we discuss our experience in addressing these issues through the novel use of program comprehension models (PCM). We found our use of PCMs helped us to provide better explanations as to what some advice means or why it seems inconsistent, and provided a tool to students to help them make decisions that leads to their code being more comprehensible.