Improving Source Code Readability: Theory and Practice

Fakhoury, Sarah; Roy, Devjeet; Hassan, Adnan; Arnaoudova, Vernera

doi:10.1109/icpc.2019.00014

Cited by 43 publications

(27 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…Their results show that this happens only in a minority of the cases. Fakhoury et al (2019) recently reported a similar result. This effect could be due to the fact that even if a change improves readability, the improvement might be small with respect to the size of the changed class, and so this makes explainable the difference in the metric.…”

Section: Code Readabilitysupporting

confidence: 61%

“…It is less evident, instead, to what extent developers think that making an effort to keep the source code readable is important and worthwhile during software evolution. Previous studies investigated the developers' perception of code readability (Pantiuchina et al, 2018;Fakhoury et al, 2019): such studies provide implicit evidence that code readability matters to developers: since some commit messages mention the tentative improvement of code readability, it can be deduced that developers strive to make the code more readable. To the best of our knowledge, no previous work tried to look at explicit evidence that developers care about code readability in software evolution.…”

Section: Motivating Study: Survey Of Developer Behaviormentioning

confidence: 99%

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How does code readability change during software evolution?

et al. 2020

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Code reading is one of the most frequent activities in software maintenance. Such an activity aims at acquiring information from the code and, thus, it is a prerequisite for program comprehension: developers need to read the source code they are going to modify before implementing changes. As the code changes, so does its readability; however, it is not clear yet how code readability changes during software evolution. To understand how code readability changes when software evolves, we studied the history of 25 open source systems. We modeled code readability evolution by defining four states in which a file can be at a certain point of time (non-existing, other-name, readable, and unreadable). We used the data gathered to infer the probability of transitioning from one state to another one. In addition, we also manually checked a significant sample of transitions to compute the performance of the state-of-the-art readability prediction model we used to calculate the transition probabilities. With this manual analysis, we found that the tool correctly classifies all the transitions in the majority of the cases, even if there is a loss of accuracy compared to the single-version readability estimation. Our results show that most of the source code files are created readable. Moreover, we observed that only a minority of the commits change the readability state. Finally, we manually carried out qualitative analysis to understand what makes code unreadable and what developers do to prevent this. Using our results we propose some guidelines (i) to reduce the risk of code readability erosion and (ii) to promote best practices that make code readable.

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Section: Code Readabilitysupporting

confidence: 61%

Section: Motivating Study: Survey Of Developer Behaviormentioning

confidence: 99%

How does code readability change during software evolution?

et al. 2020

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“…Results from our previous work [16] highlights a clear need for a readability model that is able to successfully capture readability improvements in practice. We identify several promising metrics that are able to successfully capture these improvements and should be considered by future readability models.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 96%

“…In other words, in the context of incremental changes made to a pre-existing file, models are unable to capture improvements in the source code's cohesion, complexity, coupling, and readability. Recently, we found that there exists a significant discrepancy between the readability models created by researchers and developers' perception of readability improvements in practice, as captured in commit messages [16]. When applying these models to both versions of a file, before and after the change was made, readability improvements can only be captured 40% of the time.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Model to Detect Readability Improvements in Incremental Changes

Roy

Fakhoury

Lee

et al. 2020

Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Program Comprehension

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Identifying source code that has poor readability allows developers to focus maintenance efforts on problematic code. Therefore, the effort to develop models that can quantify the readability of a piece of source code has been an area of interest for software engineering researchers for several years. However, recent research questions the usefulness of these readability models in practice. When applying these models to readability improvements that are made in practice, i.e., commits, they are unable to capture these incremental improvements, despite a clear perceived improvement by the developers. This results in a discrepancy between the models we have built to measure readability, and the actual perception of readability in practice. In this work, we propose a model that is able to detect incremental readability improvements made by developers in practice with an average precision of 79.2% and an average recall of 67% on an unseen test set. We then investigate the metrics that our model associates with developer perceived readability improvements as well as non-readability changes. Finally, we compare our model to existing state-of-the-art readability models, which our model outperforms by at least 23% in terms of precision and 42% in terms of recall. CCS CONCEPTS • Software and its engineering → Maintaining software; • Computing methodologies → Machine learning.

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“…According to Collar et al [11] improved readability saves developer's time while reading the code that eventually helps in bringing down the overall development cost. Readability is important not only during development time to improve software quality [1] but also during maintenance because reading the code is the first stage of maintenance [3]. Research also shows that the maintainability of a software is measured by the readability and understand-ability of code.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Code Readability Management of High-level Programming Languages: A Comparative Study

Tariq¹,

Bashir²,

Babar³

et al. 2020

IJACSA

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Quality can never be an accident and therefore, software engineers are paying immense attention to produce quality software product. Source code readability is one of those important factors that play a vital role in producing quality software. The code readability is an internal quality attribute that directly affects the future maintenance of the software and reusability of same code in similar other projects. Literature shows that readability does not just rely on programmer's ability to write tidy code but it also depends on programming language's syntax. Syntax is the most visible part of any programming language that directly influence the readability of its code. If readability is a major factor for a given project, the programmers should know about the language that they shall choose to achieve the required level of quality. For this we compare the readability of three most popular high-level programming languages; Java, C#, and C++. We propose a comprehensive framework for readability comparison among these languages. The comparison has been performed on the basis of certain readability parameters that are referenced in the literature. We have also implemented an analysis tool and performed extensive experiments that produced interesting results. Furthermore, to judge the effectiveness of these results, we have performed statistical analysis using SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Sciences) tool. We have chosen the Spearman's correlation ad Mann Whitney's T-test for the same. The results show that among all three languages, Java has the most readable code. Programmers should use Java in the projects that have code readability as a significant quality requirement.

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Improving Source Code Readability: Theory and Practice

Cited by 43 publications

References 22 publications

How does code readability change during software evolution?

How does code readability change during software evolution?

A Model to Detect Readability Improvements in Incremental Changes

Code Readability Management of High-level Programming Languages: A Comparative Study

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