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A metric for software readability
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A metric for software readability   (Citations: 15)
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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 be- tween a simple set of local code features and human notions of readability. Using those features, we construct an au- tomated readability measure and show that it can be 80% eective, and better than a human on average, at predict- ing 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 im- portant than simple blank lines to local judgments of read- ability.
Conference: International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis - ISSTA , pp. 121-130, 2008
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    • ...Buse and Weimer’s metric model for software readability is based on simple constructs albeit within source code rather than natural language text [8]...

    Aaron K. Massey, et al. Assessing the accuracy of legal implementation readiness decisions

    • ...Our noise detectors were partially inspired by other papers which try to correlate the density of static analysis warnings with various measures of software quality [12, 13, 6]. The challenge these researchers face is that the warning counts are impacted by code churn, and noise detectors provide a way to detect the proportion of warning removals that are essentially random...

    Nathaniel Ayewah, et al. The Google FindBugs fixit

    • ...In a previous study of human judgments of source code readability, the length of a snippet of code and the number of identiers it contained were the two most relevant factors | and both were negatively correlated with readability [6]...

    Raymond P. L. Buse, et al. Automatically documenting program changes

    • ...There has been effort in the past that focused on analysing source code comments, for example in [16] human annotators were used to rate excerpts from Jasper Reports, Hibernate and jFreeChart as being either More Readable, Neutral or Less Readable...

    Ninus Khamis, et al. Automatic Quality Assessment of Source Code Comments: The JavadocMiner

    • ...In addition, we evaluate the readability of methods using a readability metric [10]...
    • ...We also seek to verify the link between the readability of source code and FindBugs warnings found by Buse and Weimer [10]...
    • ...Existing research on source code readability focuses on the contribution the components of source code make to readability [10], and the way in which the semantic content of identifiers contributes to readability and program comprehension [1], [5], [2]...
    • ...Buse and Weimer [10] developed a readability metric for Java derived from measurements of, among others, the number of parentheses and braces, line length, the number of blank lines, and the number, frequency and length of identifiers...
    • ...The readability of source code was evaluated using a readability metric tool developed by Buse and Weimer [10]...
    • ...Where we found associations, our results largely confirm the connection between readability and FindBugs warnings found by Buse and Weimer [10]...
    • ...However, the readability metric developers found that identifier length was not a significant influence on the readability of source code [10]...
    • ...Buse and Weimer [10] found a relationship between source code readability and FindBugs warnings, and we [6] found associations between identifier quality and FindBugs warnings...

    Simon Butler, et al. Exploring the Influence of Identifier Names on Code Quality: An Empiri...

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