A Study on the Comprehensibility of Behavioral Programming Variants

Adiel Ashrov, Arnon Sturm, Achiya Elyasaf, Guy Katz

2025

Abstract

Behavioral Programming (BP) is a software engineering paradigm for modeling and implementing complex reactive systems. BP’s goal is to enable developers to incrementally model systems in a manner naturally aligned with their perception of the system’s requirements. This study compares two BP variants: classical, context-free BP, and the more recently proposed Context-Oriented BP (COBP). While BP advocates simplicity and modularity, COBP introduces context-aware constructs for handling context-dependent behaviors. A practical question arises: which variant leads to reactive systems that are more comprehensible for developers? Through a controlled experiment with 109 participants, we evaluated both variants across two dimensions: comprehension of execution semantics and identification of requirements from implementations. The results indicate that BP generally leads to better comprehension and higher confidence; while COBP demonstrates advantages in complex, context-dependent behaviors. These findings provide guidance for choosing between BP variants based on system complexity and context-dependent requirements.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Ashrov A., Sturm A., Elyasaf A. and Katz G. (2025). A Study on the Comprehensibility of Behavioral Programming Variants. In Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering - Volume 1: ENASE; ISBN 978-989-758-742-9, SciTePress, pages 252-267. DOI: 10.5220/0013440800003928

in Bibtex Style

@conference{enase25,
author={Adiel Ashrov and Arnon Sturm and Achiya Elyasaf and Guy Katz},
title={A Study on the Comprehensibility of Behavioral Programming Variants},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering - Volume 1: ENASE},
year={2025},
pages={252-267},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0013440800003928},
isbn={978-989-758-742-9},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering - Volume 1: ENASE
TI - A Study on the Comprehensibility of Behavioral Programming Variants
SN - 978-989-758-742-9
AU - Ashrov A.
AU - Sturm A.
AU - Elyasaf A.
AU - Katz G.
PY - 2025
SP - 252
EP - 267
DO - 10.5220/0013440800003928
PB - SciTePress