A metric for software readability

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A metric for software readability

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International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis archive
Proceedings of the 2008 international symposium on Software testing and analysis table of contents

Seattle, WA, USA

SESSION: Metrics and threads table of contents

Pages 121-130

Year of Publication: 2008

ISBN:978-1-60558-050-0

Authors

Raymond P.L. Buse	University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA
Westley R. Weimer	University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA

Sponsors

ACM: Association for Computing Machinery
SIGSOFT: ACM Special Interest Group on Software Engineering

Publisher

ACM New York, NY, USA

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ABSTRACT

In this paper, we explore the concept of code readability and investigate its relation to software quality. With data collected from human annotators, we derive associations between a simple set of local code features and human notions of readability. Using those features, we construct an automated readability measure and show that it can be 80% effective, and better than a human on average, at predicting readability judgments. Furthermore, we show that this metric correlates strongly with two traditional measures of software quality, code changes and defect reports. Finally, we discuss the implications of this study on programming language design and engineering practice. For example, our data suggests that comments, in of themselves, are less important than simple blank lines to local judgments of readability.

REFERENCES

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