An Explorative Study on Code Comprehension: Issues and Challenges

Program comprehension is an important cognitive process in software development and maintenance, as software needs to be adequately understood for correct maintenance. However, programmers spend most of their time to understand source code. Thus, many researchers proposed approaches and techniques to improve the code comprehension. As the associated amount of work increases, the question arises as to how researchers handle program comprehension. To address this question, we conduct a literature review on program comprehension. This article presents (i) preliminary findings from the literature review regards to code comprehension and (ii) research gaps and challenges. The resultant overview gives an insight about the field's primary contribution and aid in finding gaps in existing work. This review is very helpful for novices working in the area of software maintenance.