Program Comprehension and Code Complexity Metrics: A Replication Package of an fMRI Study

Abstract

In this artifact, we document our publicly shared data set of our functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study on programmers. We have conducted an fMRI study with 19 participants observing program comprehension of short code snippets at varying complexity levels. We dissected four classes of code complexity metrics and their relationship to neuronal, behavioral, and subjective correlates of program comprehension. Our data corroborate that complexity metrics can—to a limited degree—explain programmers' cognition in program comprehension. In the paper on the fMRI study, we outline several follow-up experiments investigating fine-grained effects of code complexity and describe possible refinements to code complexity metrics. We view our conducted experiment as a starting point to link code complexity metrics to neural and behavioral correlates. To enable future research to continue this line of work, we aim to provide as much support as possible to conduct similar studies with this artifact.