Replication package - The Mind Is a Powerful Place: How Showing Code Comprehensibility Metrics Influences Code Understanding

Replication package for:

Marvin Wyrich, Andreas Preikschat, Daniel Graziotin and Stefan Wagner. The Mind Is a Powerful Place: How Showing Code Comprehensibility Metrics Influences Code Understanding. To appear in: Proceedings of the 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE ’21), Madrid, Spain.

- The `data` folder contains dataset, R analysis script, and figures for the paper
- the `material` folder contains the snippets used for the experimental tasks (`code snippets` subfolder), the environment in which participants had to understand the code (`environment` subfolder) and the task sheet form to evaluate code comprehension.

The R analysis script allows to reproduce all statistical analysis steps of the paper as well as its figures. We recommend calling `setwd()` before running the script contents, so that the dataset can be properly loaded.

For ethics and privacy reasons, we had to drop the following potentially identifying fields from the openly released dataset, because the fields might enable participants to identify their peers:

- Age
- Gender
- Subject (study plan)
- Program
- Semester no.

These missed details will still allow full reproducibility of the study.