A Comprehensive Research Study on Participant's Maintenance Effort and Effort Adjustment Factor for Performance Appraisal of Computer Programmers

Abstract

We recruited 1 senior and 23 computer-science graduate students who were participating in our directed research projects. The participation in the experiment was voluntary although we gave participants a small incentive by exempting participants from the final assignment. By the time the experiment was carried, all participants had been asked to compile and test the program as a part of their directed research work. However, according to our pre-experiment survey, their level of unfamiliarity with the program code (UNFM) varies from "Completely unfamiliar" to "Completely familiar". We rated UNFM as "Completely unfamiliar" if the participant had not read the code and as "Completely familiar" if the participant had read and understood the code, and modified some parts of the program prior to the experiment.

The performance of participants is affected by many factors such as programming skills, programming experience, and application knowledge.  We assessed the expected performance of participants through pre-experiment surveys and review of participants' resumes. All participants claimed to have programming experience in either C/C++ or Java or both, and 22 participants already had working experience in the software industry. On average, participants claimed to have 3.7 years of programming experience and 1.9 years of working experience in the software industry.