"CYBER-FILM": A VISUAL APPROACH THAT FACILITATES PROGRAM COMPREHENSION

Abstract

This paper presents a visual approach that will make program comprehension easy. This visual approach employs "Cyber-Films" where a user can use them not only as a programming tool but also as a learning tool. This paper briefly describes how to use "Cyber-Films" as a programming tool, how to use them as a learning tool, and how to guarantee the absence (or at least minimize the presence) of syntax errors in programming. In order to verify that "Cyber-Films" are also useful as a learning tool, a prototype implementation was developed and an experiment was conducted. This paper presents and discusses the results of that experiment. Its goal was to evaluate whether or not the visual approach used was easy to understand even for users with no background at all. The results of that experiment showed that the majority of the respondents correctly identified each scheme of communication presented in "Cyber-Film" format by just observing the set of frames in animation either once or twice and at most thrice before understanding a given scheme. Because the respondents easily identified how a given scheme worked by observing it, this approach can also facilitate the understanding of programs written by other people.