Using cognitive easiness metric for program comprehension

Program comprehension is one of the most critical phases in software maintenance. During program designing, the codes having related function and behavior are often scattered in different parts of program, which increases the difficulty of understanding program, and further obfuscates programmers. In this paper, we propose an approach to assisting comprehension process using cognitive easiness metric, which can predicate the easiness degree of a method to understand in various comprehension phases. The approach uses coarse-grained call graph slicing technique and intra-procedural coarse-grained slicing technique to compute the cognitive easiness of non-understood methods based on those understood methods in the program. It can not only guide programmers to investigate the non-understood codes in the program from the easier parts to the harder parts, but also support different guidance for different programmers. Finally, we evaluate the effectiveness and practicability of our approach by applying to a case study.