A metric for software readability

Subscribe (Full Service)


	Search: The ACM Digital Library The Guide

	Feedback

A metric for software readability

Full text

Pdf (431 KB)

Source

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

Bibliometrics

Downloads (6 Weeks): 39, Downloads (12 Months): 294, Citation Count: 0

Additional Information:

abstract references index terms collaborative colleagues

Tools and Actions:	Request Permissions Review this Article Save this Article to a Binder Display Formats: BibTeX EndNote ACM Ref

DOI Bookmark:	Use this link to bookmark this Article: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1390630.1390647 What is a DOI?

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

Note: OCR errors may be found in this Reference List extracted from the full text article. ACM has opted to expose the complete List rather than only correct and linked references.

	1	K. Aggarwal, Y. Singh, and J. K. Chhabra. An integrated measure of software maintainability. Reliability and Maintainability Symposium, 2002. Proceedings. Annual, pages 235--241, September 2002.
	2	Scott Ambler, Java coding standards, Software Development, v.5 n.8, p.67-71, Aug. 1997
	3	P. Anderson and T. Teitelbaum. Software inspection using codesurfer. WISE '01: Proceeding of the First workshop on inspection in software engineering, July 2001.
	4	Benjamin B. Bederson , Ben Shneiderman , Martin Wattenberg, Ordered and quantum treemaps: Making effective use of 2D space to display hierarchies, ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG), v.21 n.4, p.833-854, October 2002 [doi>10.1145/571647.571649]
	5	Barry Boehm , Victor R. Basili, Software Defect Reduction Top 10 List, Computer, v.34 n.1, p.135-137, January 2001 [doi>10.1109/2.962984]
	6	L. W. Cannon, R. A. Elliott, L. W. Kirchho, J. H. Miller, J. M. Milner, R. W. Mitze, E. P. Schan, N. O. Whittington, H. Spencer, D. Keppel, , and M. Brader. Recommended C Style and Coding Standards: Revision 6.0. Specialized Systems Consultants, Inc., Seattle, Washington, June 1990.
	7	Thomas J. Cheatham , Jungsoon P. Yoo , Nancy J. Wahl, Software testing: a machine learning experiment, Proceedings of the 1995 ACM 23rd annual conference on Computer science, p.135-141, February 28-March 02, 1995, Nashville, Tennessee, United States [doi>10.1145/259526.259548]
	8	Tsong Yueh Chen , Fei-Ching Kuo , Robert Merkel, On the Statistical Properties of the F-measure, Proceedings of the Quality Software, Fourth International Conference, p.146-153, September 08-10, 2004 [doi>10.1109/QSIC.2004.27]
	9	T. Copeland. PMD Applied. Centennial Books, Alexandria, VA, USA, 2005.
	10	Edsger Wybe Dijkstra, A Discipline of Programming, Prentice Hall PTR, Upper Saddle River, NJ, 1997
	11	James L. Elshoff , Michael Marcotty, Improving computer program readability to aid modification, Communications of the ACM, v.25 n.8, p.512-521, Aug 1982 [doi>10.1145/358589.358596]
	12	R. F. Flesch. A new readability yardstick. Journal of Applied Psychology, 32:221--233, 1948.
	13	Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., No Silver Bullet Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering, Computer, v.20 n.4, p.10-19, April 1987 [doi>10.1109/MC.1987.1663532]
	14	J. Frederick P. Brooks. The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, 20th Anniversary Edition. Addison-Wesley Professional, August 1995.
	15	A. Goncalves. Get acquainted with the new advanced features of junit 4. DevX http://www.devx.com/Java/Article/31983, 2006.
	16	James Gosling , Bill Joy , Guy Steele , Gilad Bracha, Java Language Specification, Second Edition: The Java Series, Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, 2000
	17	Todd L. Graves , Alan F. Karr , J. S. Marron , Harvey Siy, Predicting Fault Incidence Using Software Change History, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, v.26 n.7, p.653-661, July 2000 [doi>10.1109/32.859533]
	18	R. Gunning. The Technique of Clear Writing. McGraw-Hill International Book Co, New York, 1952.
	19	Nuzhat J. Haneef, Software documentation and readability: a proposed process improvement, ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes, v.23 n.3, p.75-77, May 1998 [doi>10.1145/279437.279470]
	20	A. E. Hatzimanikatis , C. T. Tsalidis , D. Christodoulakis, Measuring the readability and maintainability of hyperdocuments, Journal of Software Maintenance: Research and Practice, v.7 n.2, p.77-90, March-April 1995 [doi>10.1002/smr.4360070203]
	21	G. Holmes, A. Donkin, and I. Witten. Weka: A machine learning workbench. Proceedings of the Second Australia and New Zealand Conference on Intelligent Information Systems, 1994.
	22	David Hovemeyer , William Pugh, Finding bugs is easy, ACM SIGPLAN Notices, v.39 n.12, December 2004 [doi>10.1145/1052883.1052895]
	23	T. M. Khoshgoftaar , E. B. Allen , N. Goel , A. Nandi , J. McMullan, Detection of software modules with high debug code churn in a very large legacy system, Proceedings of the The Seventh International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE '96), p.364, October 30-November 02, 1996
	24	J. P. Kinciad and E. A. Smith. Derivation and validation of the automated readability index for use with technical materials. Human Factors, 12:457--464, 1970.
	25	Patrick Knab , Martin Pinzger , Abraham Bernstein, Predicting defect densities in source code files with decision tree learners, Proceedings of the 2006 international workshop on Mining software repositories, May 22-23, 2006, Shanghai, China [doi>10.1145/1137983.1138012]
	26	John C. Knight , E. Ann Myers, Phased inspections and their implementation, ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes, v.16 n.3, p.29-35, July 1991 [doi>10.1145/127099.127101]
	27	R. Kohavi. A study of cross-validation and bootstrap for accuracy estimation and model selection. International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 14(2):1137--1145, 1995.
	28	R. Likert. A technique for the measurement of attitudes. Archives of Psychology, 140:44{53, 1932.
	29	Lionel E. Deimel, Jr., The uses of program reading, ACM SIGCSE Bulletin, v.17 n.2, p.5-14, June 1985 [doi>10.1145/382204.382524]
	30	S. MacHaffie, R. McLeod, B. Roberts, P. Todd, and L. Anderson. A readability metric for computer-generated mathematics. Technical report, Saltire Software, http://www.saltire.com/equation.html, retrieved 2007.
	31	G. H. McLaughlin. Smog grading -- a new readability. Journal of Reading, May 1969.
	32	Richard J. Miara , Joyce A. Musselman , Juan A. Navarro , Ben Shneiderman, Program indentation and comprehensibility, Communications of the ACM, v.26 n.11, p.861-867, Nov. 1983 [doi>10.1145/182.358437]
	33	Thomas M. Mitchell, Machine Learning, McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 1997
	34	Nachiappan Nagappan , Thomas Ball, Use of relative code churn measures to predict system defect density, Proceedings of the 27th international conference on Software engineering, May 15-21, 2005, St. Louis, MO, USA [doi>10.1145/1062455.1062514]
	35	C. V. Ramamoorthy , Wei-Tek Tsai, Advances in Software Engineering, Computer, v.29 n.10, p.47-58, October 1996 [doi>10.1109/2.539720]
	36	Darrell R. Raymond, Reading source code, Proceedings of the 1991 conference of the Centre for Advanced Studies on Collaborative research, October 28-30, 1991, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
	37	P. A. Relf. Tool assisted identifier naming for improved software readability: an empirical study. Empirical Software Engineering, 2005. 2005 International Symposium on, November 2005.
	38	Spencer Rugaber, The use of domain knowledge in program understanding, Annals of Software Engineering, v.9 n.1-4, p.143-192, 2000 [doi>10.1023/A:1018976708691]
	39	C. Simonyi. Hungarian notation. MSDN Library, November 1999.
	40	S. E. Stemler. A comparison of consensus, consistency, and measurement approaches to estimating interrater reliability. Practical Assessment, Research and Evaluation, 9(4), 2004.
	41	Herb Sutter , Andrei Alexandrescu, C++ Coding Standards: 101 Rules, Guidelines, and Best Practices (C++ in Depth Series), Addison-Wesley Professional, 2004
	42	T. Tenny, Program Readability: Procedures Versus Comments, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, v.14 n.9, p.1271-1279, September 1988 [doi>10.1109/32.6171]
	43	Aaron Watters , James C. Ahlstrom , Guido Van Rossum, Internet Programming with Python, Henry Holt and Co., Inc., New York, NY, 1996
	44	E. J. Weyuker, Evaluating Software Complexity Measures, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, v.14 n.9, p.1357-1365, September 1988 [doi>10.1109/32.6178]