Estimating understandability of software documents

Laitinen, Kari

doi:10.1145/232069.232092

Cited by 36 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…This allows names to carry [natural language] semantic cues that aid in program understanding and support software development. However, overuse of abbreviations can lead to a preponderance of unique symbols programmers must decipher [5], which may lead to inhibited understanding [8].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Impact of Limited Memory Resources

Binkley

Lawrie

Maex

et al. 2008

2008 16th IEEE International Conference on Program Comprehension

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Impact of Limited Memory Resources

Binkley

Lawrie

Maex

et al. 2008

2008 16th IEEE International Conference on Program Comprehension

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“…Understandability is relatively in reverse to complexity [21]. It involves interpreting and understanding stakeholder terminology, concepts, viewpoints and goals [27].…”

Section: Re Objectives (Reos)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Evaluating the Effectiveness of a Goal-Oriented Requirements Engineering Method

Al-subaie

Maibaum

2006

Fourth International Workshop on Comparative Evaluation in Requirements Engineering (CERE'06 - RE'06 Workshop)

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As an attempt to answer the need for methods and tools in requirements engineering (RE) IntroductionThere has been strong evidence that RE needs proper engineering methods and tools, which are domain specific and comprehensive, in supporting major REOs, and that require very detailed tools associated with them, to produce high quality requirements, to save time and the effort of rework on requirements, and to reduce resources, such as the size of RE teams [1]. Moreover, there has been growing interest in GORE approach that is based on the identification of system goals and the transformation of these goals into requirements; it addresses concerns of why a certain goal is required, how it can be achieved and who is responsible for it in the system and/or the environment [2] [3] [22]. To address these issues, the research we are undertaking proposes to evaluate KAOS, a GORE method, and Objectiver, as associated tool for KAOS, for the following reasons: (i) the role of goals in RE is fundamental while they are a main part of use-cases in object-oriented and goal-oriented approaches; moreover, the goal notion is increasingly being used on current RE methods and techniques because there is a perceived inadequacy of the traditional systems analysis approaches when they are applied to complex software systems [2] [3] [5]; (ii) the KAOS method is the only method of the GORE family that pays special attention to the use of formal proof for model analysis; (iii) the Objectiver tool fully supports the KAOS methodology and is a commercially supported tool that can be relied on to help in the evaluation, and has been applied to a number of industrial problems and case studies already at Cediti-Belgium; (iv) the RE community is eager not only to understand KAOS and Objectiver, but also to be aware of how to improve them to be more supportive for the RE area and to extend the range of their success in solving most common RE complications; and (v) this research is believed to be the first research that related method-detected errors to REOs and objectives of the method itself, in order to give some processes or techniques as a guide to detect the diversion away from the REOs or their own objectives and get the development back on track. (ii) enabling a systematic derivation of requirements documents from requirements models; and (iii) improving the validation process, the quality of requirements documents and stakeholder communication [7]. The evaluation result will help to answer the research questions: (i) How well do KAOS and Objectiver meet the criteria established in the discipline of RE; and (ii) How well do KAOS and Objectiver achieve their own self-defined objectives. This paper describes our research, but, due to the page limitations, it presents only the part of the research that takes into account the major REOs using the first target problem and some of the primary results of the evaluation.

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“…There are many metrics proposed in the literature to measure the readability of documents such as Fog Index [28], SMOG [35], language of the software [32], FleschKincaid metric [48] etc. but none of these can be used to measure the understandability of the source-code.…”

Section: Source-code Understandability Of Object-oriented Softwarementioning

confidence: 99%