RESEARCH ARTICLE THE ROLE OF COGNITIVE FIT IN THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SOFTWARE COMPREHENSION AND

Although there is a long tradition of empirical studies of software developers, few studies have focused on software maintenance. Prior work is predicated on the belief that higher levels of software comprehension are associated with higher levels of performance on modification tasks. This study provides a more complete under-standing of the relationship between software comprehension and modification. We conceptualize software maintenance as inter-linking comprehension and modification, and argue that the rela-tionship between the two is moderated by cognitive fit. Specifically, cognitive fit exists when the software maintainer’s dominant mental 1Peter Todd was the accepting senior editor for this paper. representation of the software and their mental representation of the modification task emphasize the same type of knowledge. We hypothesize that when cognitive fit exists, greater improvements i