Introduction to the special issue on program comprehension

It is a pleasure to introduce the papers in this Special Issue based on the 24 International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC 2016). ICPC is the principal venue for works in the area of program comprehension. ICPC aims to provide a quality forum for researchers and practitioners from academia and industry to present and discuss state‐of‐the‐art results and best practices in the field of program comprehension. The ICPC'16 call for papers attracted 67 submissions to the research track. Each submitted paper was reviewed by at least threemembers of the programcommittee (PC). Each PCmember had four or five papers to review in 25 days. Then, all paperswere discussedonline among the ProgramCo‐ Chairs and the PC members to make a final decision. As the output of this process, 20 papers were accepted, leading to a ~30% acceptance rate. After the conference, held in Austin, Texas, on May 16‐17, 2016, the Program Co‐Chairs carefully selected four of the 20 accepted papers and invited their authors to submit an extended version to the Journal of Software: Evolution and Process. Paper selection was mainly based on the reviews and the feedback collected during the online discussion, but we also considered the presentation at the conference and the interest by the attendees. To be included in this special issue, we asked the authors to substantially enhance and revise their work. Three of the four papers accepted our invitation and went through another thorough reviewing process undergoing multiple review rounds. Two of the submitted papers were finally accepted for publication. The two papers are