An Empirical Study on Novice Programmer’s Behaviors with Analysis of Keystrokes

2. Related Work

There are a lot of research activities regarding the cognitive activities during software engineering process. Davies did a systematical analysis on the programming strategy (Davies,1993), and suggested to study the explanation of programming skill and to integrate ideas about knowledge representation with a strategic model, which might enable us to make predictions about how changes in knowledge representation might give rise to particular strategies and to the strategy changes associated with developing expertise.

Visser (1987) conducted experiments on professional programmers to study the strategies that were used during programming. He found that programmers memorized a variety of data sources and sample program listings, so programmers may recall that a solution exists in a listing, find the listing, and then use the coded solution as an approach for the current problem. The programming knowledge was classified by Ye and Salvendy (Ye & Salvendy, 1996) into a five level abstractions. They also found that experts have better knowledge at an abstract level, and the novices tend to have more concrete knowledge.