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Program comprehension is one of the first and most frequently performed activities during software maintenance and evolution. In a program, there are not only source code, but also comments. Comments in a program is one of the main sources of information for program comprehension. If a program has good comments, it will be easier for developers to understand it. Unfortunately, for many software systems, due to developers’ poor coding style or hectic work schedule, it is often the case that a number of methods and classes are not written with good comments. This can make it difficult for developers to understand the methods and classes, when they are performing future software maintenance tasks. To deal with this problem, in this paper we propose an approach which assesses the quality of a code comment and generates suggestions to improve comment quality. A user study is conducted to assess the effectiveness of our approach and the results show that our comment quality assessments are similar to the assessments made by our user study participants, the suggestions provided by our approach are useful to improve comment quality, and our approach can improve the accuracy of the previous comment quality analysis approaches.

Many techniques have been proposed to represent uncertainty in data visualization. However, little research has been reported on the evaluation of their effectiveness. Moreover, no studies have been conducted to evaluate direct volume rendering (DVR)-based uncertainty visualization techniques. In this paper, we present a novel method that evaluates the perceptual effectiveness of four existing and one proposed DVR-based uncertainty visualization techniques. Four types of searching tasks that include identifying the maximum uncertainty data, identifying the minimum uncertainty data, identifying the maximum scalar data and identifying the minimum scalar data have been involved in this study, and a total of twenty-eight participants have contributed to the final main user study. Our analysis suggested that the proposed linked views and interactive specification (LVIS) technique appears to be the most accurate among all techniques, although it takes the longest task completion time. For the four existing techniques, the overlays technique appears to be the most advantageous, and it takes similar task completion time as the others. We believe that these findings can provide useful guidance for future uncertainty visualization design.

The reading experience on a mobile device can be influenced by many external elements that affect the viewing conditions. The user holding position, operating style, and the light conditions of the surroundings can all play a crucial factor in the legibility of the text. Furthermore, the user’s eye conditions may be an extra factor to consider when determining how to improve the reading experience. This study presents a context-aware application that adjusts the text font size based on the distance between the user and the device. The users select their preferred font size at certain distances in the calibration phase, accounting for individual preferences or their eye conditions, and the application uses the device’s front camera to calculate the distance in real time and adjust the font size accordingly. We present implementation details and challenges faced during development and how they were addressed. A two-part experiment ($n$ = 34) revealed that the application scored an excellent usability score while no differences were found between users with and without eye conditions, showing that both user groups find it equally usable. Additionally, initial results suggest that the visual landmarks used showed a promising start at addressing issues related to our approach.

This paper presents results of a piece of research conducted in order to determine user preferences as to the nature of virtual worlds to be used as an environment for information retrieval. A study was carried out amongst postgraduate students and staff at Robert Gordon University, using a Grounded Theory methodology. Over one hundred interviews were carried out, in three cycles of interviewing, analysis, and integration with literature. The findings revealed that user preferences were determined less by structural features than by affective factors, such as familiarity, organisation, assistance, and quality of information and presentation.