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About Lero Research

Lero is the Irish software research centre.It brings together leading software research teams from Universities and Institutes of Technology in a coordinated centre of research excellence with a strong industry focus. Lero has raised the level and profile of Irish software research with such effect that it is now one of the best known and highly regarded software-related research centres in the world.  The centre has the proven capacity to attract and retain global research leaders and to make a substantial contribution both to software-related research and to the Irish economy. The Lero Centre is supported by a Research Centre grant from SFI, by other state grants, by industry contributions and by external funding (particularly the EU’s research programmes). Lero interfaces with a wide range of industry, state agencies, educational bodies and international collaborators to deliver on its twin goals of research excellence and social and economic relevance.

Bloom’s taxonomy: a framework for assessing programmers’ knowledge of software systems

Abstract

Programmers must attain knowledge about a system before they can perform specific software maintenance tasks on it. Traditionally, computer scientists have described the activity of attaining this knowledge as ‘software comprehension’. However, if we look at the educational literature, attainable knowledge has been described with much finer granularity. Bloom’s (1956) taxonomy identifies six separate levels of knowledge within the cognitive domain, one of which refers to a (more constricted) definition of comprehension. Several other levels in Bloom’s taxonomy seem to correlate more directly to specific software maintenance tasks. This article reviews Bloom’s taxonomy as a richer descriptive framework for programmers’ knowledge of code and illustrates how various software maintenance tasks map to knowledge levels in this hierarchy. A pilot study is presented showing how participants’ knowledge of software may differ at various levels of this hierarchy.

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