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

Abstract

This paper presents a series of two experiments in which programming behaviors were observed and analyzed when they were programming with pressure and without pressure. There were eleven and twenty-four subjects respectively. In both experiments, the authors used a software tool to record the keystroke frequency, designed criteria to evaluation program quality, and conducted a survey after the experiment. The experiment results show that there is no direct relation between the numbers of keystrokes and programmer’s performance when programmers are working without pressure or with pressure. The first experiment results demonstrate while novice programmers are diverse in terms of programming styles, ones with more experiences tend to control code execution in finer granularity. Source code format can be an indicator of programming performance. The second experiment results demonstrate that programmers with higher performance likely have higher keystroke productivity. Programmers are also more productive under pressure in terms of keystrokes.